One of the nice things about virtualising Microsoft software (on any platform) is that you can save money.\u00a0 Licensing like Windows Datacenter, SMSD, SQL Datacenter, or ECI all give you various bundles to license the host and all running virtual machines on that host.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Two years ago, you might have said that you\u2019d save a tidy sum on licensing over a 2 or 3 year contract.\u00a0 Now, we have servers where the sweet spot is 16 cores of processor and 192 GB of RAM.\u00a0 Think about that; that\u2019s up to 32 vCPUs of SQL (pending assessment, using the 2:1 ratio for SQL) Server VMs.\u00a0 Licensing one two pCPUs could license all those VMs with per-processor licensing, dispensing with the need to count CALs!<\/p>\n
In it\u2019s just getting crazier.\u00a0 The HP DL980 G7 has 64 pCPU cores.\u00a0 That\u2019s 128 up to vCPUs that you could license for SQL (using the 2:1 ratio for SQL).\u00a0 And I just read about a SGI machine with 2048 pCPU cores and 16TB of RAM.\u00a0 That sort of hardware scalability is surely just around the corner from normal B2B.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And let\u2019s not forget that CPUs are growing in core counts.\u00a0 AMD have led the way with 12 core pCPUs.\u00a0 Each of those gives you up to 24 SQL vCPUs.\u00a0 Surely we\u2019re going to see 16 core or 24 core CPUs in the near future.<\/p>\n
Will Microsoft continue to license their software based on sockets, while others (IBM and Oracle) count cores?\u00a0 Microsoft will lose money as CPUs grow in capacity.\u00a0 That\u2019s for certain.\u00a0 I was told last week that VMware have shifted their licensing model away from per host licensing, acknowledging that hosts can have huge workloads.\u00a0 They\u2019re allegedly moving into a per-VM pricing structure.\u00a0 Will Microsoft be far behind?<\/p>\n
I have no idea what the future holds.\u00a0 But some things seem certain to me.\u00a0 Microsoft licensing never stays still for very long. \u00a0Microsoft licensing is a maze of complexity that even the experts argue over.\u00a0 Microsoft will lose revenue as host\/CPU capacities continue to grow unless they make a change.\u00a0 And Microsoft is not in the business of losing money.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One of the nice things about virtualising Microsoft software (on any platform) is that you can save money.\u00a0 Licensing like Windows Datacenter, SMSD, SQL Datacenter, or ECI all give you various bundles to license the host and all running virtual machines on that host.\u00a0 Two years ago, you might have said that you\u2019d save a … Continue reading “Will Hardware Scalability Change Microsoft Virtualisation Licensing?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[181,183,192,195],"class_list":["post-11125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-virtualisation","tag-hyper-v","tag-licensing","tag-sql","tag-virtualisation"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11125"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11125\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}