Category: SQL

Every year they promise us simplification.  Let’s see how they’ve score this time around …

The major versions are:

• Enterprise: moves up to replace the now gone Datacenter, and is only licensed on a per-core basis.  Yup, not server + CAL.
• Business Intelligence (BI): slots in the middle and is only available under server + CAL (just to confuse).
• Standard: Available under server + CAL, as well as per-core.

By the way, there is a lovely contradiction about Enterprise being available and limited on server + CAL basis.  But everywhere else, it says per Core only for this edition.  There’s a reason (see later).

We are told that:

“SQL Server 2012 will continue to be available in Developer, Express and Compact editions. Web Edition will be offered in a Services Provider License Agreement (SPLA – hosting licensing) model only. Datacenter Edition is being retired with all capabilities now available in Enterprise. Workgroup and Small business Editions are also being retired”.

If you are licensing per core then you buy the licenses in 2-core packs, with a minimum of 4 cores per physical processor.

If you are licensing on a per-VM basis then you have two options:

Note how they are counting virtual cores?  It used to be that we had a formula to count physical CPUs being used by the VM and licensed that.  Maybe the price works out similarly – I’ll have to check that out later.

More on virtualised SQL 2012:

• To license a VM with core-based licenses, simply pay for the virtual cores allocated within the virtual machine (minimum of 4 core licenses per VM).
• To license a VM under the Server + CAL model (for the Business Intelligence and Standard Editions of SQL Server 2012), you can buy the server license and buy associated SQL Server CALs for each user.
• Each licensed VM that is covered with Software Assurance can be moved frequently within your server farm or to a third party hoster or cloud services provider.
• The Enterprise Edition with Software Assurance allows you to deploy an unlimited number of database VMs on the server (or server farm) in a heavily consolidated virtualized deployment to achieve further savings.

They note that:

• Further savings can be achieved by operating a database server utility or SQL private cloud. This is a great option for customers who want to take advantage of the full computing power of their physical servers and have very dynamic provisioning and de-provisioning of virtual resources.
• Customers will be able to deploy an unlimited number of virtual machines on the server and utilize the full capacity of the licensed hardware.
• They can do so by fully licensing the server (or server farm) with Enterprise Edition core licenses and Software Assurance based on the total number of physical cores on the servers.  This allows customers the ability to have unlimited virtual machines to handle their dynamic workloads and fully utilize the hardware’s computing power.

In other words, if you will have lots of SQL VMs then you should have a dedicated virtualisation (any platform) cluster for your SQL VMs, and license it using Enterprise per-core licenses with SA.  That’s what we currently advise to save on licensing – you have to do the maths on additional Windows Server + hardware + power + management time/licenses VS SQL license cost reduction.

If you want to license Enterprise SQL via server + CAL then you better move quick:

“New Server licenses for EE will only be available for purchase through 6/30/2011. Additional EE licenses in the Server and CAL license model will not be sold thereafter.

Both newly purchased Server licenses for SQL Server EE 2012 or EE licenses with SA upgraded to SQL Server EE 2012 will be limited to server deployments with 20 cores or less. If you purchased SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition in the Server + CAL model with Software Assurance and at the launch of SQL Server 2012 are running on a server with > 20 physical cores, contact your Microsoft representative for help transitioning to the new licensing model”.

The SA upgrade story looks confusing.  I’m not going to try interpret it.  I’ll leave it with this thought …. WTF are they thinking and who OKd this!?!?!  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it in public now: this stuff makes an EU treaty look easy to comprehend.  My advice to MSFT is to burn the licensing rules, and start over.

BTW, I am one to say I told you so:

“Microsoft licensing never stays still for very long. Microsoft licensing is a maze of complexity that even the experts argue over. Microsoft will lose revenue as host/CPU capacities continue to grow unless they make a change. And Microsoft is not in the business of losing money”.

If your virtual machine has 4 vCPUs and it’s running on a multiple CPU host, how many SQL Per Proc licenses do you need to buy (if you’re not doing Server/CAL)?  Well this question just came up at work and we wanted to get it right for the customer.

There are two sources of information.  This blog post distils it down and this whitepaper explains it on page 5.

Right now, the answer is usually 1 per Proc license per virtual OSE (VOSE or virtual operating system environment – aka a guest OS in a VM) in the Hyper-V world.   And here’s why.

Take a 4 vCPU VM running on a host with 2 * quad core CPUs.  4 vCPUs = 4 logical processors.  With hyperthreading disabled (or enabled in this case) this VM never runs on more than 1 physical CPU.  We can license SQL Server by pCPU.  So if it never runs on 1 pCPU then we can buy just 1 copy of SQL Server per proc. 

What if this VM runs on a Hyper-V cluster?  Do we need to buy 1 per Proc license per host?  Nope.  We buy the licensing for the VOSE (VM OS).

Let’s change it up.  What if the host has 2 dual core CPUs with no hyperthreading?  Now we need to use a formula:

VOSE SQL Server Per Proc Licenses = A / B where

• A = number of VPUs in the VM
• B = Cores/CPU

In this case the number of SQL Server per proc licenses = 4/2 = 2.  And that makes sense; the 4 vCPUs in the VM run on 4 logical processors, and the 4 logical processors are made up by 2 dual core CPUs.

Things are kind of easy right now with Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V (maximum of 4 vCPUs per VM).  But what about Windows Server 8 or vSphere 5.0 where it increases to 32 vCPUs/VM?  Let’s have a 32 vCPU VM running on 4 * 10 core Intel CPUs with hyperthreading enabled.  Ouch, my head hurts already.

• A = 32
• B = 20 (10 cores by 2 threads)

The formula gives us 32/20 = 1.6 pCPUs.  The VM can’t run on 1.6 pCPUs; it will span 2 pCPUs (we always round up).  That means the 32 vCPU VM can be licensed with just 2 SQL Server Per Proc licenses on this host.

Who wants to do division, fractions, and roundups?  This might sound like hassle but it’s good because it saves you money and keeps you legal.  In our most basic example above, the customer pays for 1 per proc license instead of 4.  In the most complex one, they pay for 2 per proc licenses instead of 32.

And that’s how to license a single VM.  Things get a whole lot more complex when licensing many SQL VMs and then you start looking at buying SQL Enterprise/Datacenter licensing at the host level, and then throw in virtualisation clustering where your SQL licensing impacts on your virtualisation design so you can save large amounts of money.  I covered that one about a year ago and am happy to leave it there for the moment