[windows software] MS licensing in a virtualised environmwnt

[timbo343]

Our MS licenses (EES) are soon to expire and with us moving over to a virtualised environment how would i license our SQL for SIMS and our Exchange. SQL used to be licensed per processor for us as that was the cheapest option as the SIMS only ever had one physical processor and because we were still on the agreement where we could license per processor it worked out a lot cheaper.

 

I understand that the virtualised environment needs the data centre license but really stuck on the SQL side.

 

We will be having 2 hosts/hypervisors running server 2012 r2 with hyper-v each with 2x 6 core 12 thread processors in them.

 

How does the licensing for SQL and Exchange work?

[CAWJames]

Our environment is much like this with SQL and Exchange virtualised.

 

While you don't "need" Datacenter licenses to virtualise, you only get rights to 1 VM and a multi-use host, or 2VM's and a host only allowed to be a hypervisor. You can stack up Standard licenses though, so 2 Standards will give you rights for 4 processors, 4 VM's and a hypervisor host, and so on.

 

A Datacenter license is 2 processor and unlimited VM's, so you would stack Standards until it became cost effective to buy a DC license, all depends on how many processors in your server and how many VM's you intend to run on it. With your setup, a single license of either will cover your 2 processors, so would be just down to amount of VM's

 

We then pay a server licence for SQL, and the same for Exchange, as these aren't FTE, just per server. OVSE SQL Server Standard Licence 1Yr AP and OVSE Exchange Server Standard Licence 1Yr AP respectively. This works just as if you had physical servers.

 

In terms of CALs we pay on FTE for SQL Device CAL's(OVSE SQL Server Device CAL 1Yr FTE) and the Exchange CAL is included in the Desktop Education Pack(OVSE Desktop Education Pack Ent CAL 1Yr FTE)

 

Hope that makes sense!

 

James