Windows – Legal to install an OEM license of Windows 7 in VMWare Fusion

licenseoemvmware-fusionwindows 7

I have a desktop (HP) and a laptop (MacBook Pro). HP is currently running Vista Ultimate. (It came with Vista Premium; I formatted it and installed Vista Ultimate because I had a license for that on hand. A friend helpfully reformatted my restore partition.) MBP is running Mac OS X.VI with VMWare Fusion to Windows 7 RC.

I'd like to upgrade both to Win7 Ultimate. I've researched the OEM license and found it a bit frustrating – Microsoft seems not to like coming out and saying who's eligible to purchase and who isn't. However, it SEEMS that with Windows 7 anyone who's (a) building the computer themselves and (b) OK with having to provide their own support is eligible to buy and use an OEM license.

This brings me to my interesting question. Who's the builder of a virtualized PC image? Is it the person who installs the virtualization software (me)? Is it the builder of the hardware the image is run on? (Wouldn't that be interesting if you decided to run it on a different machine?) In short, am I eligible to purchase an OEM license to run under virtualization, or should I attempt to restore the original Vista Premium install on the HP from the OEM sticker, upgrade it to Windows 7 Premium, upgrade that to Ultimate with Anytime Upgrade, and move Vista Ultimate to the MBP (then upgrade it to Windows 7 Ultimate)?

(And if I am eligible to purchase an OEM license for running under VMWare, are there any pitfalls I should know about? Like the whole thing never working again if I upgrade my VMWare version?)

If you have an answer, please also cite its source, since I've been able to find a couple of places saying virtualization is allowed (and a couple of places saying it's disallowed) but none of them pointing to an official Microsoft source.

Please Note: SuperUser is NOT a legal resource, and any answers provided are not in any way guaranteed to be legally correct. For correct legal information it is recommended to consult a lawyer

Best Answer

Quoted from this thread Windows 7 licensing rights:

What license do you have? Retail, OEM, and Volume Licensing are all different.

Volume Licensing http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/springboard/archive/2009/08/06/windows-7-enterprise-edition-understanding-software-assurance-volume-licensing.aspx:

"Virtual OS Rights - Use up to four instances of Windows in virtual OS environments for each license that has active Software Assurance coverage." Notice that this appears under MDOP. "MDOP is an add-on subscription license"

You can find the retail and OEM EULAs here: http://www.microsoft.com/about/legal/useterms/default.aspx

As far as I know, since the days of Vista, Microsoft allowed running up to 4 virtual machines, as long as they use the same operating system and serial number as in the physical machine.

EDIT

It's finally quite unclear what are the virtualization rights of a desktop Windows version, with conflicting opinions between authorities (even Microsoft). Finally, only a thorough examination of the EULA can maybe give some answer (and maybe not).

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