Licensing question when running Windows XP under Windows XP (using vmware)

Question

If I've purchased one license for Windows XP, is it legal to run a second copy on the same machine (in a second partition, under Linux) with vmware?

Answer 1

Well, it's unlikely anyone is going to complain about it.

As I understand it, it kind of depends on which version of XP you have, s the license sets different terms for each of the different versions. Vista had this "feature" as well -- theoretically, the less expensive versions couldn't be run under a virtual machine at all.

Answer 2

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/243174/vmware-and-licensing

Answer 3

The XP Home EULA states:

1.1 Installation and use. You may install, use, access, display and run one copy of the Software on a single computer, such as a workstation, terminal or other device ("Workstation Computer"). The Software may not be used by more than one processor at any one time on any single Workstation Computer.

which specifically says "one copy".

Interestingly, though, it appears to prohibit running XP Home on a multi-processor PC, which is news to me.

The equivalent for XP Professional states:

You may install, use, access, display and run one copy of the Product on a single computer, such as a workstation, terminal or other device (“Workstation Computer”). The Product may not be used by more than two (2) processors at any one time on any single Workstation Computer.

That still limits you to one license for the host and another for the VM (and causes consternation for 4-way CPUs (probably not quad-cores since it's arguable that's a single CPU)).

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.

Answer 4

If you purchased one licence of XP then you are unlikly to have site licence and so the Answer from Pax is sound.

In addition (as I cannot make an edit to the post) if you have MSDN you typically have a license to install 1 of each OS for development purposes which in addition to your XP license would allow you to run a VM of XP (an all the others). I don't have the particulars for this on hand however.

Answer 5

I'd recommend a Microsoft Technet subscription which will provide you with unlimited licenses for pretty much all Microsoft products (aside from Visual Studio) for testing/development purposes. That's what we use for our testing environment here.

Answer 6

I don't think the CPU count has anything to do with it. If you run VMware on a single-core machine, both the host and the guest are served by that one CPU.

The sticky part of the language is "one copy". It's hard to argue that the VM is using the same "copy" as the host. (Microsoft doesn't care about the media, they care that you copied the files off the media to a second location on the drive). To get around that part, I think you'd have to convince your VM to see the host's physical drive as its own C: drive.

I believe VMware has some things in the works where two VMs storing the same file will be stored only once. If so, then it sounds like one license would be enough to cover two VMs, since they are using "one copy" of the bits stored on disk. Of course, I'm not a lawyer.