I’ve been getting into VMware at work and it is working out well. We had eight instances of Windows XP Professional running various things. Some were development machines, some were my desktops, and a few were just filler for me trying to see how much the server could handle.

Notice the past tense.

Turns out that our site license for Windows is an upgrade license. A virtual machine is technically a blank box, it doesn’t come with Windows pre-loaded like a physical machine would say from Dell. So we are breaking our license agreement with Microsoft.

Microsoft...always complicated. (New Tag Line)

Crap.

So I MacGyver a solution to work and shut down the machines. Did I mention we are going through budget cuts at work? I don’t want to explain to the boss that we have to pay a five figure fine!

The simple solution would be to buy a couple retail copies of Windows and be done with it. Then we could put those copies on the shelves and continue on our way, being in compliance with the licensing agreement. But the boss isn’t authorizing any purchases, period. Luckily, another guy in our office found an old copy of Windows Server 2003 Enterprise we had left over. So I’m using that right now.

So now I have to migrate all those machines down to one machine and get that working.

Bummer.