I am about to get into virtualization and the most confusing part of it for me at this point is regarding licencing.
I understand that if you create a virtual machine that will be used on an other host you need a licence (full retail not previously activated) but do you also need a new licence if you are creating a VM that is a replica of an existing real world machine and will only be used on the PC that the VM was taken from? The purpose of creating this VM would be for testing so an exact replica would be nec to determine if there would be any conflicts.
Also, can a VM of the sort described above be used to restore/replace the OS and software/files etc in the event of a problem with the physical machine? Again on the same exact hardware and software that the VM was created from?