so here’s the full text of the new ColdFusion 8.0.1 EULA;
…in the event that Licensee uses Virtual Machines with respect to the Software, (a) with respect to the Standard version of the Software only, notwithstanding anything to the contrary in this Agreement, the number of 2 CPU licenses required shall be based on the greater of (A) the number of available physical CPUs for all instances of the software divided by two (2) (any fractions shall be rounded up for purposes of this provision), or (B) the number of total Virtual Machines on all Computers on which the Software is installed, and (b) with respect to the Enterprise version of the Software only, notwithstanding anything to the contrary in this Agreement, the number of 2 CPU licenses required shall be based solely on the number of physical CPUs on which the Software operates divided by two (2).
So what’s changed? Ok, so we now no longer have do the previously required multiplication - see this post here for previous analysis. Now we’re licensed on the GREATER number of either physical processors divided by 2 or the number of VMs the software is INSTALLED. Notice the word INSTALLED, this differs to the enterprise version which says ‘on which the Software operates’. So with Enterprise, if i have the software installed but it’s not running I don’t need a license - perfect for clusters and Amazon EC2 stuff. Great to see that they’ve listened to the community.
April 4th, 2008 at 2:43 pm
If I read this correctly, for standard, if I have 2 CPUs (requiring 1 license) and 6 VM’s across the 2 CPUs (requiring 6 licenses) I need the greater of those two number of licenses, so I need 6 licenses to run standard on 6 VM’s on a single two processor machine. Which I guess means that standard doesn’t really make sense fo run on VM’s. Correct?
April 4th, 2008 at 2:49 pm
correct - there’s point where it doesn’t make sense to use cf standard with VMs - the version 8 EULA actually required licenses per VM PLUS one for the physical box the VMs were running on too…! So there’s a tipping point where Enterprise becomes a better option over standard. Previous ColdFusions were ‘pre VM’ so didn’t specifically have text in the EULA so many hosting companies started offering Virtual CF hosting using the single license required for the physical CPU which Adobe obviously wanted to stop - or at least cash in on.
April 4th, 2008 at 4:55 pm
Well, this probably is going to have more people looking at BlueDragon (and Railo) I think. While certainly it’s understandable that Adobe wants to try and get licenses for every copy of ColdFusion being used, the customers that generally want virtual machines are those that can’t afford their own box, and thus also are going to balk at the pricing of ColdFusion over other options like PHP and .Net. It’s a shame that Adobe can’t see that trying to extract a full license price out of them is simply going to make them go elsewhere. The pricing of Enterprise is so much higher, I’m not sure it would help considering the fairly low number of virtual machines you likely run on a single box.
April 5th, 2008 at 1:21 pm
It’s an improvement and kudos for Jason and Adobe for listening. But I don’t get this: Enterprise comes with 2 cpu licenses, but is one or two of those cpu licenses consumed for each VM?
e.g. on a 2 cpu box with 4 VMs, does that require 2 or 4 purchases of CF Ent? $8000 x 2 or $8000 x 4?
If it requires 4 purchases then that’s unfair as each VM consumes half a physical cpu, not 2 cpus. Am I off track or is that right?
April 5th, 2008 at 1:38 pm
Hi Gary,
on a 2 cpu box for CF enterprise you only need to buy 1 box of CF Enterprise - it covers 2 CPUs. The number of VMs is irrelevant when you’re running enterprise.
April 5th, 2008 at 2:22 pm
Ah, thanks for that, John. So on a server with 2x quad core CPUs I can run 8 VMs with CF on each one and just pay for one Ent license (of 2 cpus).
That works really well for server consolidation and cost saving.
April 5th, 2008 at 2:53 pm
yep,you got it. 2 quad core’s are 2 physical proccessors so 1 CF license will cover both of them. With Enterprise the VM’s don’t affect license count.
April 10th, 2008 at 6:17 pm
Adobe, or someone, should make an AIR app for calculating how many licenses you need for a VM setup.
April 10th, 2008 at 6:19 pm
funnily enough i did that immediately after i first posted this - going to get it checked by Adobe first before releasing it.
April 11th, 2008 at 5:17 pm
I’m not aware of a way to know how many physical CPUs CF is running on in an EC2 instance. So how does this new EULA help with EC2 when the software is running?
April 14th, 2008 at 9:07 am
it’s tough….I woudn’t like to offer a suggestion except to license the maximum number of CPUs it’s able to run on. Enterprise license wording is about how many processors the software operates on - different to Standard which is how many processors the software is installed on. I’m only just getting started with EC2 but given the flexibility of it and the unflexibility (although the new changes are very much welcome) of the CF EULA I’m going to be waiting for the Open BlueDragon to play with that up in the cloud.
May 11th, 2008 at 9:31 pm
I’m also curious about the number of licenses required for use on EC2. I’m very interested in using ColdFusion there, but Amazon abstracts away all of the implementation of the virtual machines, and that means I can’t calculate my license needs.