We are wanting to run Vmware on our machine and run 2 or more Windows 2003 servers from it. My questions are since Windows 2003 server is licensed to be on one computer (Once CPU) Do we need a licence for each virtual operating system since they are on the one machine? Also in vmware how does the ram limit work, say I have a machine with 4gig of ram and I have two virtual servers each with 1 gig allocated to them does it effectivly partition the ram making those two gigs unaccessable to the host machine? or is it just setting a limit to how much a virtual operating system can use? Thanks in advance

license - yes, you do need to licenses. MS would lose a lot of money if someone went and bought one beefed up server running 20 win 2k3. vMware: the memory will be shared between host and vmware. it sets the set on how much virtual machiens can use. in your case, 1 gb limit for one machine 1 gb limit for one machine because computers hopefully, virtual or not, do not max out their memory, let's say use 50%. you host should be able to use 3GB. if the virtual mahchines are not using 100% memory. If they did, you got a problem already.

"license - yes, you do need to licenses. MS would lose a lot of money if someone went and bought one beefed up server running 20 win 2k3." Kinda. It's how many concurrent instances of the software you run. For example, let's say you have 4 VM's on a server, plus the host OS, all Windows 2003. You only plan to run up to two VM's at once. Therefore, you would need three Windows 2003 server licenses. (Host machine OS must run to allow VMware to run, + any 2 VM's). You do NOT need 5 licenses though! Taken from their licensing site: "•Use terms for each software license specify the number of instances of software that you may run on a particular server at a time, rather than the number of copies of the software that you may install and use on your server." For more info: http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/highlights/virtualization.mspx "Milk was a bad choice!"

Hey cheers guys, thats all we needed to know, thanks for your help :)