Calculating how many Microsoft licenses you need in your virtualization infrastructure is not an easy task. Windows edition (Standard, Enterprise or Datacenter) can severely impact on final price and opportunity to grow. And back-end servers like SQL Server are part of this equation too.
To simplify this hard task Microsoft released a license calculator in January 2007, providing a simplified system to compare costs in three different scenarios where you are implementing different Windows editions.
After just 5 months Microsoft is ready to launch second version of this tool, still available for free as an online application, with a completely revamped approach.
Now users can literally build up virtual machines, filling them with Windows and Microsoft back-end servers they plan to deploy in production, and have a calculation of complete licensing costs of the infrastructure.
This new version is also able to calculate costs when you are using 3rd party virtualization platforms, including hosted solutions (like SWsoft Virtuozzo) and bare-metal ones (like VMware ESX Server).
Given this feature, Microsoft Virtualization Calculator becomes a mandatory tool in any virtualization project, and its highly recommended.
Access it here.
Update: Microsoft also published a 3-minutes demo of this new calculator which worth a check: