Category: Licensing

Brent Ozar looks at an ugly aspect of Windows Server 2016 licensing:

Windows Server 2016 is now licensed by the core, but that’s not really the big problem. The bigger problem is buried in the licensing guide (PDF):

• “A minimum of 16 core licenses is required for each server.”
• “A minimum of 8 core licenses is required for each physical processor.”

When most sysadmins see that, they’ll think, “Okay, so I shouldn’t bother buying a server smaller than 2 8-core processors.”

There are plenty of scenarios in which this doesn’t hurt (much):  mainly when you need a hefty server with more than 16 cores, or when you are running in a virtualized environment and can split that hardware across a number of logical servers.

As for me, this is one reason why I’m looking forward to SQL Server on Linux.

Joey D’Antoni compares licensing costs of SQL Server versus Oracle for one particular customer:

When I see those numbers in Microsoft marketing slides, I sometimes wonder if they can be real, but then I put these numbers together myself. Granted you would get some discounts, but the fact that all of these features are built into SQL Server, should convince you of the value SQL Server offers. Pricing discounts are generally similar between vendors, so that is not really a point of argument. If you are doing a really big Oracle deal you may see a larger upfront discount, but you will still be paying your 23% support fees on that very large list price. (Software Assurance from Microsoft will be around 20%, but from a much lower base) Additionally, several of these features ae available in SQL Server Standard Edition. None of these features are in Oracle’s Standard Edition.

In a follow-up post, Joey discusses Postgres:

Postgres is a really good database engine, with a rich ecosystem of developers writing code for it. SQL Server on the other hand, is a mature product that has had a large push to support analytic performance and scale.

Additionally, this customer is leveraging the Azure ecosystem as part of their process, and that is only possible via SQL Server’s tight integration with the platform.

This isn’t a direct comparison to help determine in some absolute sense which product is better, but rather looking at a use case from a customer which takes advantage of many of the features in SQL Server.

David Klee discusses SQL Server licensing on a unique (but growing in popularity) hardware architecture:

Now, look at the hyper-converged architectures. The CPUs used for I/O handling are the same as those that your VMs use to power your applications. A substantial portion of the host’s CPU power is now needed for I/O handling, and this activity comes first in the CPU scheduling queues.

This fact, by itself, is not necessarily a problem. Most virtualization host CPUs are relatively lightly utilized, and this amount of CPU needed for I/O handling is readily absorbed without causing a performance problem.

But, larger scale SQL Servers can read and write exceptionally large amounts of data around the clock. The I/O handling at the host layer can start to drain resources from the host. The additional activity scheduling time inside the hypervisor could be slowing down these SQL Servers without you knowing it.

As always, work out how your licensing would look under different alternatives or you could end up wasting a pretty penny.

Slava Murygin has notes on licensing SQL Server 2016:

– Two Major Licensed Editions: Enterprise and Standard;
– Enterprise Edition can be licensed only “By Core”. Standard also available on “Server+CAL*” basis;
– If you have SA** you can still use your old CAL licenses with SQL Server 2016 Enterprise Edition, but will be limited by usage of only 20 Cores on your server;
– Standard Edition is limited by 4 Sockets/16 Cores and 128 Gb of Memory;

Licensing is boring, painful, and ultimately necessary to understand.