ESXi Hypervisor and OEM server 2008 licencing - ?

[Stuart Bradbury]

Hi I have been trying to get a straight answer to this without any luck so i thought i would post here in case anyone has tried it. I want to buy some server 2008 licenses and i'm running HP hardware (DL360 G5s) so it seems more cost effective to get the HP OEM license packs for my servers. I want to use the enterprise license to give me the ability to run 4 virtual machines on each host. I do not want to use the microsoft hypervisor, i will instead be using vmware's ESXi.

Now I realise that the HP OEM license is bios locked to HP hardware, my question is:

Will this OEM license allow me to install on an ESXi host and still be able to tell that it is on HP hardware? will i need the HP tools integrated version of the ESXi hypervisor installed for it to work?

Thanks for any help,

Stuart

[Chris Witten]

The way I see it is VMware virtual machine provides a complete virtual PC for the operating system running in it. The vendor-specific hardware and BIOS components expected by the OEM software are not present inside the virtual machine and the installation or restore may fail.

I am not to sure what the licensing says about it but I would not be surprised if it did not let you put OEM on a virtual machine, OEM is very tightly licensed.

Sorry its not a precise answer but its a start.