Discussion on:

Distribute prebuilt system configurations with VMware

What about the licensing issues involved in distributing a copy of an OS installed in a virtual machine? Sounds to me like you could be in serious trouble unless you had a site license that applied to the recipient of the virtual machine you just created. Anybody have any thoughts on this?

Licensing of VMWare is as you would license any other instance of an operating system - there is no free lunch from software efficiency!

Thus if the OS in question requires purchasing - it would be required when distributing a VM.