I'm attempting to make several test machines virtual. Ideally I'd like to setup several images with various installed software - eg. windows 7 with quickbooks 2010, vista with quickbooks 2009, etc - save the images, then restart them later as needed on other hosts.
My question is: will I run into licensing issues? I own licenses for all the software so I'm no worried about whether this is permitted or not, I'm asking if practically I will run into issues with software refusing to run for any reason.
Haven't decided between xen/vmware/virtualbox for the virtualization environment, if that makes any difference.
You shouldn't have a problem. The virtual machine doesn't have any idea what physical machine it is running on, so it shouldn't know that the hardware under it has changed.
You may run into problems with the machine SID if you run multiple VM's simultaneously, especially if the VM's are joined to a domain.
This is not specifically a license problem, though. It's not that hard to change the a Machine SID, using something like sysprep.