Sql server 2012 licensing virtual environment

There is one catch, those 90 days still apply if you reassign the license to a server outside the server farm or to a non-private cloud. For more information, see the Application Mobility paragraph. If you have to answer one of the following questions with yes, you have to use Core based licensing.

The maximum supported number of instances is 50 on a stand-alone server for all SQL Server editions. Hardware partitions and blades are considered to be separate servers for licensing purposes and SQL Server software licenses cannot be assigned to more than one server at any time.

To license individual VMs using the Per Core model, customers must purchase a core license for each v-core or virtual processor, virtual CPU, virtual thread allocated to the VM. With a minimum of a four core license per VM. When licensing individual VMs, core factors do not apply. Licensing individual VMs is the only licensing option available for SQL Server Standard Edition customers who are running the software in a virtualized environment under the Per Core model.

Licensing the physical layer with SQL Enterprise edition on all physical cores can reduce overall costs. You are allowed to run as much VMs as that you licensed physical cores. If you want to run 15 VMs on the server example above you will need 3 extra core licenses but have to buy 4 core licenses because they are 2-packed by Microsoft. If you want to run unlimited number of VMs to handle dynamic workload and fully utilize hardware computing power than you have to cover all Enterprise Edition core license with SA.

Your use rights are expanded then to allow any number of instances of the software to run in any number of OSEs physical or virtual. SQL Server software can be configured to pick up processing, recover and continue on a second server if the first server fails.

All editions of SQL Server provide basic high availability features including backup log shipping, database mirroring and two-node failover clustering. Advanced AlwaysOn high availability features in SQL Server Enterprise Edition include enhanced support for multiple, active readable secondary servers and support for multi-site failover clustering.

In an Active — Active deployment you have to license all cores on both sides. For each properly licensed instance of SQL Server, customers can run a supporting passive instance in a separate OSE for temporary support. This passive failover instance can run on a server other than the licensed server.

New for the SQL Server Enterprise Edition, AlwaysOn Availability Groups enable customers to configure multiple databases that will failover as a unit, including support for up to four active secondary servers and two synchronous secondary servers. The ability to use secondary servers for more than just passive failover support can improve the performance of primary, reporting and backup workloads due to better balancing of workloads across instances, helping to provide better return on hardware investment.

Note: When secondary servers are actively used to support these additional workload scenarios—that is, when the servers used for failover purposes are no longer truly passive—they must be fully licensed accordingly. One license is required for each person that accesses or uses the software. When using SQL Server software for development, test or demonstration purposes, only the users are licensed and a corresponding license for the actual server systems running SQL Server software is not required.

As long as only licensed users have access to the software, customers can install any number of copies of the software on any number of servers that are used exclusively for development, test or demonstration purposes.

This is significant, because it allows customers to run the software on multiple devices for testing purposes, for example without having to license each non-production server system. With this SA benefit, customers can re-assign SQL Server licenses to different servers within a server farm as often as needed.

Customers can also reassign licenses to third party shared servers. This can provide significant cost savings as well as simplicity in licensing. Without License Mobility, the company could only move licenses to a different server once every 90 days, which for this example means the company would need to maintain enough licenses on each server to cover the peak number of VMs that could be moved to the server at any time.

Another scenario in which License Mobility can help save costs is when organizations host virtualized workloads both in their datacenters and in the public cloud. License Mobility provides the flexibility to help address this need. There are a few additional considerations to be aware of with License Mobility:.

For organizations with a large number of VMs and complex, highly dynamic virtual environments, Microsoft offers the option to license for maximum virtualization.

This means that when all of the cores on a server are licensed and covered with Software Assurance, a customer can deploy any number of VMs on the server. The key benefits of licensing for maximum virtualization are simplicity and potential cost savings. Maximum virtualization ensures that customers are covered, without needing to be concerned with tracking individual VMs or the amount of power assigned to each VM.

This is especially relevant for private cloud scenarios with a large number of VMs being moved dynamically between different physical servers, when self-provisioning is enabled, or when hyper-threading is turned on.

The Enterprise DBC Appliance enables the consolidation of hundreds of databases into a single virtual environment through an integrated hardware and software solution. In this scenario, an organization has deployed the base configuration of the Enterprise DBC Appliance, in which the physical servers are combined as a pooled virtual resource that supports a large number of VMs. Further complicating this scenario for licensing purposes is that the VMs are being moved dynamically between the server blades in the appliance to maintain peak performance.

By licensing all of the physical cores in the appliance, and covering those licenses with Software Assurance, the organization can deploy an unlimited number of VMs. This can dramatically simplify licensing, as the organization can be assured that all VMs are correctly licensed, even when they are dynamically moved across the different servers in the appliance.

The customer can also spin up as many new VMs as they need without ever needing to buy additional licenses. One important factor when licensing for maximum virtualization is to determine which use rights apply. When deploying VMs on a server, the use rights of the most recent licensed version apply to every VM on the server. In scenarios like this one, it may still be possible to license VMs individually but it is likely to be difficult to manage.

There are a few caveats to consider when licensing individual VMs in highly dynamic environments. While customers can license up to four VMs with a single Enterprise Edition server license, as VMs are moved dynamically in this scenario, it would be impossible to ensure that all four VMs move together across the servers. In this case, License Mobility will not work and it is strongly recommended that one Enterprise Edition server license is assigned to a single VM.

In this case, it may be impossible to track virtual core-based usage if customers license individual VMs with core licenses. The following overview summarizes the software virtualization rights for current and prior versions, editions and licensing models of SQL Server software. This summary should not be a substitute for careful review and understanding of your rights and obligations as described in your Microsoft Volume Licensing agreement and the Product Use Rights.

When licensing individual VMs under the Per Processor licensing model, all virtual processors v-cores supporting the VM must be licensed. No additional CALs are required. For licensing purposes, a virtual processor maps to a core when hyper-threading is turned off or hardware thread when hyper-threading is on.

To calculate the number of processor licenses required for each VM, divide the number of virtual processors in the VM by the number of physical cores or threads per physical processor.

If this results in a fraction, round up to the next whole number. When licensing individual VMs under the Per Core licensing model, all virtual cores supporting the VM must be licensed, with a minimum of four core licenses required. For licensing purposes, a virtual core maps to a core when hyper-threading is turned off or a hardware thread when hyperthreading is on.

All rights reserved. The information in this document represents the current view of Microsoft on the content. You must be logged in to post a comment. When hyper-threading is turned on, a core license is required for each thread supporting a virtual core. In the example below, hyper-threading is enabled for the physical processor supporting a VM. Since hyperthreading creates two hardware threads for each physical core, a total of 8 core licenses would be required in this scenario.

A core license allows a single virtual core to be supported by a single hardware thread. For this reason, in a single-core architecture, you may wish to make sacrifices with e.

Microsoft stipulate that for those customers installing SQL Server in virtual environments, a core license is required for every virtual core in the virtual environment that is supported by one hardware thread this means physical processor core OR hyperthread.

Be very wary when using hyperthreading on physical machines that support VMs, as licensing costs can double despite having no additional physical computing power! This means that if there exists a VM with multiple virtual cores, one license is required for each virtual core even if supported by fewer hardware threads than cores. However, if multiple hardware threads are supporting fewer cores, one license is required for each hardware thread.

Core factoring does not apply for VMs. There is a minimum four licenses required per VM regardless of VM cores. In example number 3 above, the VM is under provisioned against the physical machine so you may wish to add more VMs so that VM core licensing is appropriate to get better value for or even save money , or turn off hyperthreading, or go for maximum virtualization see below for more details to remove the need to license per core on each VM.

Note that physical licensing wins out over virtual licensing. Microsoft call this 'Licensing for Maximum Virtualization' and enables you to disregard your VM cores, so should you decide to have more VM cores than physical ones you will not necessarily be penalized. So if you decide to physically license your cores even though you're running VMs, you will be able to run SQL Server in VMs up to a maximum number equal to the number of physical core licenses you hold. For example, if you have a large server with 8 processors, 6 cores per processor, you will require 48 core licenses.

But this will allow you to run up to 48 VMs with an unlimited number of cores per VM. If you wanted dual-core VMs, under the virtualization core licensing model you would be required to purchase 96 licenses, but by purchasing core licenses for the physical processors you could be required to purchase half that amount. If SA is purchased on Enterprise Edition and all physical core licenses are purchased, the one-license-per-VM rule is waived and customers are allowed to use an unlimited number of instances on an unlimited number of VMs on that server.

Also note that for Parallel Data Warehouse Edition, these rules are slightly different. PDW is used primarily in multi-stack servers with multiple nodes, called 'compute nodes', similar to clustering.

Each cluster node is licensed as if it were a separate physical server. The rules change slightly when considering mirroring and High-Availability, but the rules for this are quite simple.

Only one passive node is waived for licensing purposes per active node. If multiple passive nodes are used, licensing on all but one of these passive nodes is required. With the License Mobility benefit available under Software Assurance, customers can reassign licenses between servers as often as necessary within a server farm. This may allow customers to be more flexible with their server and infrastructure configurations.

Note that licensing is limited to server deployments with 20 cores in total or less per server, physical or otherwise - if any additional core licenses are required for your freshly-minted IBM behemoth, you will need to contact Microsoft directly for licensing assistance.

If using Standard Edition or Business Intelligence edition, this limit is 16 cores per server. As this author painfully remembers, most resellers and indeed Microsoft will no longer allow the purchase of volume licenses for SQL Server products below Edition.

This means that even if your organization is intent on remaining on a pre edition of SQL Server, licensing rules including the core license requirements still apply. I have a 32 core DB server. But SQL Standard supports maximum of 16 cores. If I purchase 16 core license, and install 2 instances of SQL with same license on same server, will it use all 32 cores of server or only 16 cores.

I am looking forward to implement ERP in my company. I want to use Microsoft Express edition free at my branch offices and for my head office, I will buy licensed solution. This is way better blog than others and has shared much of the knowledge regarding the SQL licensing. Hello, I work for one of the leading financial bank in North America. We are now migrating as much as we can from Microsoft sql server to other DBMS platforms like Oracle, my sql, db2 server.

This is unfortunate that they have started let go sql dba as well. I could not find the difference between the two cases and if they are the same which one is correct I think the one in the table isn't? Regarding SPLA vs. SQL Express - do you still have to pay for Express if you're hosting commercial content? Regards, David. Jeff, based on what you mentioned you could use either the Standard edition or the Express edition free.

The other editions wouldn't make sense. The Express edition doesn't have all of the features of Standard, but if you are just using the database engine you might be fine. After reading the article and comments, I am still confused what I need.

I am told Standard is sufficient. We'll never grow above 1 server and 5 users. What is my best SQL option least expensive? Virtualization is not in the cards I don't know what it would do for us.

This could be a thread or a core but is shown to the VM as a core. Therefore you would only need 4 licences not