Thursday, January 19, 2012

Licensing Impact On Virtual Machines With SQL 2012

In my earlier post Microsoft SQL Server Per Processor License For VM, I gave a simple example on licensing SQL Server 2008 in virtual environment.  However, this is going to change with SQL Server 2012.  With SQL Server 2012, the licensing will change from processor based to core based.  If you are having Enterprise Edition deployed on a physical server with 2 X 10 cores, you will need to buy 20 cores license!

In the virtual environment, if the physical server has 2 X 10 cores, you have a few options for core based licensing.

  • License based on the number of virtual core assigned to a virtual machine.  If you assign 8 virtual cores to a virtual machine, you will buy 8 cores license.
  • License all the cores of the physical server which will be 20 cores license.  If this is done with SA (Software Assurance), you can have unlimited SQL Server 2012 installed.  Without SA, it will be 1 SQL Server 2012 per core license which will be 20 X SQL Server 2012 installation for this case.

There other changes to the SQL Server 2012 licensing model and you can visit http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/en/us/future-editions/sql2012-licensing.aspx to read more about it.

No comments: