Server 2016 Licencing for VMs

[gsk]

Hi All,

 

Just after some quick pointers:

 

I have 2 physical hosts and want to run VMs on them. I have OVS for office and would like to add the Server Licences to that agreement. What do I need?

 

Thanks,

[benjie]

Your best bet would be to contact your reseller for more information.

 

If your host have Datacentre license you basically get unlimited VMs.

[gsk]

Thanks,

 

I will end up going to the reseller I think. I was hoping there was a more economical but legitimate way of doing it without the massive price bump of datacenter version.

[kmount]

You can stack Standard licenses up but it all depends on how many cores in your hosts, how many VMs, etc.

 

Datacenter is viable if you have beyond a certain number of VMs on the host at which point stacking standard licenses costs more than datacenter.

 

Lets start again, how many CPU cores in the physical servers, and how many VMs do you want to run? And which hypervisor?

[Sheridan]

We just asked our reseller to add on server core licenses to our OVS agreement - just estimate the number of cores your VMs will need and bung a few more on for good measure!

[gsk]

You can stack Standard licenses up but it all depends on how many cores in your hosts, how many VMs, etc.

 

Datacenter is viable if you have beyond a certain number of VMs on the host at which point stacking standard licenses costs more than datacenter.

 

Lets start again, how many CPU cores in the physical servers, and how many VMs do you want to run? And which hypervisor?

 

I'm ambivalent about which Hypervisor, either Hyper V or ESXi. Looking at dual CPU hosts with 10 physical cores in each CPU. Realistically I think 6-8 windows VMs would accomplish what we need to do, allowing for a bit of leeway for the future.

 

We just asked our reseller to add on server core licenses to our OVS agreement - just estimate the number of cores your VMs will need and bung a few more on for good measure!

Thanks, this is kind of what I was hoping for and then the crossover between Std and Datacenter is dead easy to work out. Are the licences based on physical or logical cores?

[PotNoodleTech]

Physical cores I believe but check with Reseller as things change every now and again.

 

I went straight for Datacentre on my two 12 physical core hosts as it gives me the flexibility of installing as few or as many VMs as I want for a straightforward upfront cost (that is effectively cheap as chips, compared to how server licencing used to be done).

[Sheridan]

We were told physical cores on the servers, regardless of how many you assign to your vms.

[ITGURU]

Standard Server gives you 2 VMs at no extra change,

Datacenter server gives you unlimited VMs.

 

Each license is for 2 cores. A minimum of 8 core licenses is required for each physical processor and a minimum of 16 core licenses is required for each server.

[gsk]

The 16 core minimum is interesting. Is that for Std and DC?

[markwilfan]

The 16 core minimum is interesting. Is that for Std and DC?

Yarp...