Virtualisation could leave firms needing six times more licences

License Dashboard claims confusion between user and device-based software licensing could leave firms open to hefty fines

Firms using certain virtualisation technology could need up to six times as many licences as they think they do, according to software asset management (SAM) vendor License Dashboard.

The firm warns that companies using virtualised environments can leave themselves open to hefty non-compliance fines following confusion between device and user-based licensing.

It claims that most software licences still operate on a device-based system, meaning every instance of the software on each virtual machine (VM) must be licensed.

Matt Fisher, director of License Dashboard, said licensing virtualised environments is still a grey area.

"Under virtualisation, organisations operate many instances of a software program on a single physical machine. With the traditional device-centric software licences that are the mainstay of most organisations today, such as Microsoft Office and Windows licences, the organisation is required to license each virtual machine separately," he added.

"While many vendors, including Microsoft, have added user-centric elements to their licensing terms, since the licence remains at its core a device one, licensing under virtualisation remains a grey area."

According to the firm's research, some 87 per cent of its customers who responded to its survey claimed that virtualisation is factored into their SAM strategy, but 20 per cent said they have no system in place at all.

More than two thirds of organisations asked had at least one software audit in 2012, while 16 per cent said they had three or more.

The vendor pinpoints VMware's Distributed Resources Scheduler (DRS) product as one piece of software which continues to catch people out, claiming that it has the potential to increase an organisation's server licensing requirements by up to 500 per cent at the flick of a switch.

Fisher added: "DRS can... lead to a significant shortfall in an organisation's licensing compliance, since an application has the potential to be used on every virtual machine if the need arises."