servers, as shown in Figure 1.11. Now consider having 8, 10, or 20 virtual machines
and having clusters of 16 or even 64 hosts. The unlimited number of virtual machines
that accompanies the Datacenter edition makes much more sense, as shown in Figure
1.12. Using Datacenter enables highly dense deployments of virtual machines without
you needing to worry about the licensing of the virtual machines.
Figure 1.11 Required Standard licensing to enable virtual machine mobility
Figure 1.12 Using Datacenter to enable an unlimited number of virtual machines on
the hosts for full mobility
It’s important to realize that the use of Standard or Datacenter is not related to Hyper-
V specifically, but rather the licensing of the operating systems running inside the
virtual machines, and the same would apply to any hypervisor, such as XenServer or
ESX.
This is an important point. Standard vs. Datacenter relates to the number of virtual