Office 365 ProPlus in non-dedicated hardware hosted environment
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This document shows that when Office 365 ProPlus is acquired via Volume Licencing, it has to be on hardware dedicated to the organization when on a third party server (exception for Azure)
http://download.microsoft.com/download/3/d/4/3d42bdc2-6725-4b29-b75a-a5b04179958b/licensing_office365_proplus_in_volume_licensing.pdfDoes anyone know if non-VL Office 365 ProPlus is exempt from such restrictions?
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@flaxking said in Office 365 ProPlus in non-dedicated hardware hosted environment:
Does anyone know if non-VL Office 365 ProPlus is exempt from such restrictions?
Do you mean like purchasing Retail O365 at $12/month?
Without actually seeing a license on the product I can't say for sure.
I assume the use case is you're not wanting to purchase bulk licenses for remote or freelance employees and just have them login to the suite as needed on their own equipment with credentials provided by you.
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@DustinB3403 said in Office 365 ProPlus in non-dedicated hardware hosted environment:
@flaxking said in Office 365 ProPlus in non-dedicated hardware hosted environment:
Does anyone know if non-VL Office 365 ProPlus is exempt from such restrictions?
Do you mean like purchasing Retail O365 at $12/month?
Without actually seeing a license on the product I can't say for sure.
I assume the use case is you're not wanting to purchase bulk licenses for remote or freelance employees and just have them login to the suite as needed on their own equipment with credentials provided by you.
Yes, the use case is one organization has Office365 ProPlus licences for their users and are paying a third-party for a RD server on non-dedicated hardware. Can shared activation be used for those users to use Office on that server?
I was thinking yes, but then someone with VL Office365 ProPlus brought this document forward, and I was wondering if there is something similar for non-VL or if this is just because it's VL.
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What is non-dedicated hardware in this scenario? Would the RD server up and disappear and be rebuilt elsewhere?
Assuming all of the licensing issues with RD are handled (1 license for every possible user) than the "hardware" would be the VM that is running RD Services for this business.
I think you would need a different license entirely for the use case, and not a retail license* specifically.
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This is what it sounds like you're doing/using which would require each user to have their own license (on top of everything else for RDS).
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@DustinB3403 said in Office 365 ProPlus in non-dedicated hardware hosted environment:
What is non-dedicated hardware in this scenario? Would the RD server up and disappear and be rebuilt elsewhere?
As in, other organizations have VMs running on that host
Assuming all of the licensing issues with RD are handled (1 license for every possible user) than the "hardware" would be the VM that is running RD Services for this business.
That's not true, the physical hardware still matters for licencing. We've gotten in trouble for mixing and matching different OS licencing type on the same physical host in our own infrastructure (the scenario in question is not our servers)
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In a cloud scenario, there are guaranteed to be multiple tenants on a single host, but the guest OS is on it's own virtual hardware, isolated from traffic by the networking that's put in place around that guest OS.
The fact that you got in trouble here sounds like a red harring as each Guest has it's own virtual hardware.
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@flaxking said in Office 365 ProPlus in non-dedicated hardware hosted environment:
That's not true, the physical hardware still matters for licencing.
This is for core licensing (which I agree matters), user licensing is different here as every individual user of that RDS server (I'm assuming this is a dedicated to you RDS server hosted on a shared Hypervisor) would need to have an an Office 365 Pro Plus license, and their own RDS cals to cover the usage.
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The core licensing is specifically applicable when evaluating how many core packs you would need to purchase for any given physical server.
A minimum of 16 is required today IIRC, but this obviously scales based on the number of cores that the host has, every core needs to be licensed.
This is outside of the scope of licensing for Office 365 Pro Plus and RDS though as those have their own license/CALs.
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https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/CloudandHosting/licensing_sca.aspx
This seems to say that Shared Computer Activation is not valid in a multi-tenant hardware environment except by authorized partners.
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Per my VAR, shared activation is available on any ProPlus subscription (ProPlus, E3 or E5). All users that are going to use the shared system have to be licensed with a ProPlus subscription for it to work. I am going to have to go this route to use RDS for our ERP software, which requires Microsoft Excel for exporting certain reports/info. Since we have business premium for 99% of our users, we will need to "upgrade" to E3 for all users that need access to the ERP software via RDS server. Currently 32 users.
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@wrx7m said in Office 365 ProPlus in non-dedicated hardware hosted environment:
Per my VAR, shared activation is available on any ProPlus subscription (ProPlus, E3 or E5). All users that are going to use the shared system have to be licensed with a ProPlus subscription for it to work. I am going to have to go this route to use RDS for our ERP software, which requires Microsoft Excel for exporting certain reports/info. Since we have business premium for 99% of our users, we will need to "upgrade" to E3 for all users that need access to the ERP software via RDS server. Currently 32 users.
Shared activation is available, but if not used on hardware dedicated to the organization, the hosting company has to be a QMTH
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The data center is looking into getting QMTH, but I'm not hopeful. It's sounds like there is some kind of regular MS Office SPLA licencing that will be easier
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@wrx7m said in Office 365 ProPlus in non-dedicated hardware hosted environment:
Per my VAR, shared activation is available on any ProPlus subscription (ProPlus, E3 or E5). All users that are going to use the shared system have to be licensed with a ProPlus subscription for it to work. I am going to have to go this route to use RDS for our ERP software, which requires Microsoft Excel for exporting certain reports/info. Since we have business premium for 99% of our users, we will need to "upgrade" to E3 for all users that need access to the ERP software via RDS server. Currently 32 users.
I think that this is driving a lot of "multi-RDS" deployments where some people are on the MS Office RDS server and some are on the non-Office server.
