Licensing Mac OSX for Multi-Tenant Environment
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This discussion came up yesterday and I honestly have no idea. We know that if you put a hypervisor such as VMware ESXi or XenServer onto real Apple hardware that you can legally virtualize unlimited numbers of OSX VMs on top of that hardware. This part is clear.
What I know nothing about is, what happens when this becomes multi-user or multi-tenant? Can you have one Mac OSX box and run a dozen VMs on top of it and use this as a server or for VDI? Can you not just use this one piece of hardware for a dozen users in a single company, but can you provide the resources to a dozen different companies?
If this is possible, why are there no vendors that we know of doing this today in the market? It seems like OSX VDI would be an extremely popular product offering.
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There was a vendor that sold an "RDS for OS X", it wasn't cheap. IIRC, it was almost $300 per seat
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Found it https://aquaconnect.net/
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@FATeknollogee said in Licensing Mac OSX for Multi-Tenant Environment:
There was a vendor that sold an "RDS for OS X", it wasn't cheap. IIRC, it was almost $300 per seat
That's RDS software. That doesn't tell me that it's legal to use or how it would apply to shared hardware. The intention is that that is run on your own hardware in house and software like this was popular on Windows but was a form of piracy there. I believe this is legal for in house use on Apple OSX, but the real question is how does it apply when hosted and multi-tenant.
Also, multiple access of a single OS and hosting many VMs can be covered under the same license (CentOS) or be wholly different situations (Windows) so I'm not sure what this product tells us.
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For e.g. El Capitan (OS X 10.11), section 2Biii says:
(iii) to install, use and run up to two (2) additional copies or instances of the Apple Software within virtual operating system environments on each Mac Computer you own or control that is already running the Apple Software, for purposes of: (a) software development; (b) testing during software development; (c) using OS X Server; or (d) personal, noncommercial use. The grant set forth in Section 2B(iii) above does not permit you to use the virtualized copies or instances of the Apple Software in connection with service bureau, time-sharing, terminal sharing or other similar types of services.
Other OS Flavors would have other limitations. depending on when they were released.
We are already running some dedicated Mac hardware to support this build environment but wanted to add some scale, so maybe I continue doing that until I can get somebody to support the case where I pay for a VM and not the underlying hardware. -
That's that. You can use extremely limited (2) VMs for testing or development, nothing more. You VPS, no cloud computing. No multi-tenant. So that is why Apple has no VPS presence, it's not allowed. You can get PS, but not VPS.
