Microsoft announced yesterday changes to their licensing terms for dedicated hosted cloud services.  You can read about the article here https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/licensing/news/updated-licensing-rights-for-dedicated-cloud

In summary, starting October 1, 2019, licenses purchased with an on-premise agreement (Volume Licensing that did not include Software Assurance)  cannot be deployed with a dedicated host from a “Listed Provider”.  Listed Provider includes Microsoft, Alibaba, AWS, and Google.  Windows Server, (purchased with SA or not) does not have mobility rights.  Azure Hybrid Use Benefit is still available which is probably the main reason for this change.  A customer who purchased Windows Datacenter license without SA could have deployed an AWS dedicated host and still have unlimited virtualization rights.  Azure HUB did not provide the same benefit.  Fast forward to October 1, 2019 and an end customer cannot have the same benefit of running unlimited VMs on a dedicated host if deployed through a Listed Provider datacenter.   Also consider MSDN, Windows 10, and Office.  None of which has mobility rights.  This makes the QMTH addendum that much more important.

Here’s the good news, it does not apply to other providers (yet).  If you are a SPLA partner not included on this list, educate your customers on their different deployment options.  There is a FAQ guide posted on the above link.  If you have questions, please email info@splalicensing.com.

Thanks for reading,

SPLA Man