Ms sql server 2012 licensing

If you purchase Standard edition today but find you need to expand the virtualization capacity of your licensed server, you can do one of the following:. Related resources. Azure Hybrid Use Benefit. Windows Server R2 product page. Windows Server R2 licensing guide. Windows Server R2 datasheet. Licensing Microsoft server products in virtual environments.

Download information about licensing models for using Microsoft server products with virtualization technologies. Featured Video. Windows Server Licensing. Related links. Product licensing FAQs. Microsoft Volume Licensing Activation Centers. Microsoft Payment Solutions. Learn more about the Enterprise Agreement.

Microsoft also provides a table with this information in the document entitled 'SQL Server Licensing Reference Guide', which is linked to at the end of this tip. Follow the arrows in the diagram below from your desired edition of SQL Server or from your current licensing model to find which editions or licensing models are suitable for you:.

Each edition of SQL Server differs in features. For example, Developer Edition has all the features of Enterprise Edition, but cannot be used in a commercial environment.

Standard Edition does not include features such as table partitioning, online index rebuilds or backup compression. Express Edition will handle databases up to 10GB in size only. Since the focus of this discussion is on licensing models rather than a blow-by-blow account of feature differences between editions, please see the More Links section for information on the different features of SQL Server and how they compare in order to make the best choice of edition for your organization's needs.

The document 'What's New in SQL Server ' has a good summary of new features and their availability between versions, while those of you familiar with these restrictions in R2 and below will note that most restrictions still apply. See below for Microsoft's one-page summary of the feature sets that come with Enterprise, Business Intelligence and Standard Editions note this is not a complete list :.

For example, if your organization employs people, 20 of whom work in the Finance department which has two SQL Server installations on two separate servers, 2 server licenses and 20 CALs would be required. Starting with , Microsoft recognized the shift onto core-based computing, where two or more cores are used for parallelism and better efficiency on production IT systems.

Microsoft decided to capitalize on this and protect the licensing fees which would arguably suffer as focus shifted from increasing the number of processors to increasing the number of cores. The new core-based system means each core used in a SQL Server installation must be licensed separately with some exceptions, see below.

These licenses are sold in 'packs' of two and one pack of two is roughly equivalent in price to the older per-processor license. Thus, although more licenses are required and other factors such as price adjustment and inflation have affected the price , there may not be a significant difference to the overall price when relicensing for , depending on your circumstances. Note that hyper threading is ignored for core licensing purposes when licensing physical servers.

However - something called 'Core Factor' comes into play here. Core factor refers to the factor one must multiply by when determining the licenses required, depending on the type of processor one has. AMD processors are licensed differently from Intel ones. And non-Intel, non-AMD processors are licensed differently still. Here are the rules:. Note that when ordering the licenses, you must divide the number of licenses by two to determine how many 'packs' to order.

Don't order double the amount you need by accident! As you can see, this isn't an entirely fair model. A four-core Intel processor requires 16 licenses even though performance-wise it will be thoroughly outstripped by two processors with two cores each, due to increased parallelism. 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.

Microsoft License Advisor provides list of Microsoft products, programs and their pricing. It give the report for the product and their pricing:. It provides two options for quoting:. First Step is Product Selection.

Select the product by clicking on the product that you want e. Select the Language type as per your requirement. Provide the information for Program selection. If we need any guidance for Volume Licensing products and programs, we can use Guided Quotes which provides two options:.

First step is Program Selection. Select the your option and click on Next. Click Next. Email This BlogThis!