SQL 2008 Licensing

[djm968]

Educational Price for a single device or user CAL is around £27 and IMO the PC World link you provided is not the Academic SELECT price, or PC world are making a huge profit on the CALs.

 

Before you commit to anything, I would call a few educational vendors and get their licensing specialist to do some leg work for you. They are usually very helpful and knowledgeable. I can personally recommend the licensing guys and girls at Pugh and Ramesys.

(I am in no way connected to either of these companies and I am sure there are many others that provide a good a service.)

 

Pugh SQL Server Pricing : Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Standard | Microsoft | Products | ... discounted software for education establishments

Ramesys SQL Server Pricing : Product Categories

Edited July 16, 2010 by djm968
URL updates

[Richie1972]

djm968: The link I sent was for info on the product, not the price.

If the Select price per user CAL is £27, then unless you've only got a few clients, the per processor SQL is the best option for a secondary school

[djm968]

Depends on what you define as a few.

 

The cut-off point is around 70 clients for a “Single Socket” single processor multi-core physical server but this wouldn’t be the case for a virtual machine because as you have discovered, it will see each core as a separate virtual processor and reducing the number of virtual processors for your SQL VM will obviously have an impact on performance and you will therefore need buy four SQL 2008 processor licenses at just shy of a grand each!

That’s why I suggest a SQL 2008 standard server license (supports 4 CPUs) and CALS may be the most cost effective licensing model for Virtual SQL Servers. Unless of course you have no idea how many clients or users are going to connect to the SQL server (through the firewall from the internet for example) then you have no choice and are forced to use the per processor model.

[Richie1972]

As I've already pointed out in earlier posts within this thread - it's not quite as simple as saying every virtual processor in a hyper-v client is treated as a physical processor.

If you build a hyper-v client on a host with a quad core cpu and assign 4 virtual processors to the client, the client will have a single, quad core processor (if it's server 2008, check system properties or system information and it will report 4 core, 4 logical cpu just the same as the physical server).

However, if you built your Hyper-V client on hardware with 2 dual core cpus and assigned 4 virtual processors to your client, it would report as having 2 dual core cpus.

So, now I can buy a single processor SQL 2008 R2 Std licence and have as many clients as I like for £942 (approx.)

[djm968]

If you read my relpy carefully I think you will find that I did not say every physical CPU = vCPU - I was talking about cores and the relationship to vCPUs on a Hyper V client and how this may impact SQL licensing which I thought was the reason for the OP. IF and that is the question IF you can set the Hyper V client to show that it is only using one vCPU and are happy with the performance then a single proc SQL 2008 R2 Std license is all I would buy also.

[Richie1972]

Hyper-V shows 4 virtual CPUs and the hardware uses quad core cpus. The Hyper-V client reports a quad core cpu (identical to the physical cpu). The MS docs say 1 virtual cpu = 1 physical core (not one physical cpu). So, from this information I am going to be getting a single processor SQL 2008 R2 licence.

Hopefully this should clear things up for people who may have been in the same position as myself - this has certainly cleared it up for me, as before starting this thread I was far from sure what was the correct licence option.

[DMcCoy]

Reading the R2 licensing (as thats what you get now) then that seems to be right (http://download.microsoft.com/download/2/7/0/270B6380-8B38-4268-8AD0-F480A139AB19/SQL2008R2_LicensingQuickReference-updated.pdf for people who haven't seen it).

 

It doesn't matter if it's running on both physical cpus as long as the total vCPUs stays less or equal to the total number of cores/threads in *one* of the physcial processors. It's quite a reasonable system, but the virtualisation benefits only kick in with enterprise and up (multiple VMs under a single licence)

[djm968]

Good find, this is exactly what I was looking for.

[Arthur]

Good find, this is exactly what I was looking for.

I found the easiest way to work out how many per processor licenses you need is to use the formula shown on page 3 of that quick reference PDF. For example, if you have a server with a Xeon E5640 (4 cores, 8 threads) and configured the SQL VM to have 2 virtual processors, you would only require a single per processor license (2 / 8 = 0.25).

 

Btw, did you see post #8 on the first page of this thread.