Got an interesting question from a reader of the MSExchange.org newsletter today. After having read the November edition of the newsletter he was interested in hearing whether the license rules we know from Exchange 2003 cluster setups also apply to Exchange 2007 based clusters like Cluster Continuous Replication (CCR) and Single Copy Clusters (SCC). And since I didn’t knew the answer to this question myself, I thought it was a good idea to bring it on to MS as it isn’t a good thing to make guesses when it comes to Microsoft licensing issues :)

I managed to get an answer (thanks Scott) and I can inform you that licensing rules haven’t changed when it comes to Exchange 2007 based clusters, which means you still have to buy an Exchange Enterprise license for the passive node(s) in the cluster too. The explanation being that the passive node(s), even though they are passive, still runs Exchange code in the background.