In addition, Microsoft will permit a number of customers to reassign software running on virtualisation technology within 90 days.
The Redmond giant hopes the relaxed licensing policy will increase sales of Hyper-V – a recently introduced virtualisation technology that allegedly competes with VMWare.
According to Patrick O'Rourke of Microsoft, “More and more customers are looking to maximise their initial IT investments and around 10 per cent to 15 per cent of new servers are being virtualised.”
Hyper-V, previously codenamed Viridian, is a hypervisor based virtualisation system for x64 systems that allows users to easily transfer operating systems from server to server.