Microsoft sql server 2012 license calculator

Standard - server. Standard - CAL. Per user. See your hosting partner for pricing. Not applicable. Hosting only. Volume Licensing. SQL Server Standard. Big data nodes core entitlement New. Fail-over servers for disaster recovery New. Fail-Over servers for disaster recovery in Azure New. Azure Hybrid Benefit. Fail-over servers for high availability.

Unlimited virtualization. Power BI Report Server. Machine Learning Server for Hadoop. License mobility through Software Assurance. Additional benefits for Server and Cloud Enrollment customers. Unfortunately they haven't been very clear about the licensing differences, with pages upon pages of marketing bumpf aimed at purchasers and not professionals.

Awash with buzzwords and over-hyped fad terms you say 'cloud', I say 'someone else's server' the overall effect is to confuse rather than enlighten. Consider this extract from their main page on SQL Server licensing [1]:. In the sections below, I will start with models of delivering licenses and move through the various considerations, such as support model, license type, virtualization, high-availability solutions, licensing for previous versions, and mention some of the rules that apply in different circumstances.

Links are provided at the end of the tip for further reading. This section will deal with how licensing is delivered. Volume Licensing is aimed at business, from small companies to large enterprises. Volume licensing also goes hand-in-hand with Software Assurance SA , an additional Microsoft product that applies to volume licenses for many different products and that allows different levels of support depending on the level purchased.

Volume licensing is ideal when considering larger infrastructures, with more than a trivial number of servers. Retail Licensing, on the other hand, is fairly straightforward. It's important to note that there are restrictions on retail licensing - only the Business Intelligence, Standard and Developer Editions of SQL Server are available through this model. Software Assurance contracts are not available with retail licensing. Since Volume Licensing is the most common model, the remainder of this article will focus on this channel.

Specifications and pricing are normally handled by the third-party. The Open Value license is designed for small-to-medium organizations that have five or more desktop PCs. The agreement is designed to lower up-front costs for software and lasts for two years.

The minimum license spend is for five licenses, but the program follows a pay-as-you-go model with the option to add or remove them at any time. The Select and Select Plus programs are designed for midsize organizations with a distributed infrastructure. They support affiliate licensing and include Software Assurance. They have one differing feature - the Select license expires after three years, but the Select Plus license has no expiry date, allowing the organization to benefit from fixed pricing and favorable contractual terms beyond the initial contractual period.

In all other feature areas, Select and Select Plus are identical. The final group includes Software Assurance as standard. Features include volume pricing - significantly lower than for other agreements - inclusive SA, cloud service support, license management assistance, lower up-front costs and flexible subscriptions.

EA is the standard agreement where licensing needs are driven by the organization and can be thought of as a one-size-fits-all solution. The type of licensing you will purchase will be dependent on the edition of SQL Server which you purchase, which will be dependent on the features you expect from SQL Server.

SQL Server comes in the following editions:. Each edition has limitations on the licensing models that can be used to purchase it. Please see my interpretation below, illustrating which licensing models can be used with which editions. The Express and Compact Editions are free, and do not require licenses. Microsoft also provides a table with this information in the document entitled 'SQL Server Licensing Reference Guide', which is linked to at the end of this tip.

Follow the arrows in the diagram below from your desired edition of SQL Server or from your current licensing model to find which editions or licensing models are suitable for you:.

Each edition of SQL Server differs in features. For example, Developer Edition has all the features of Enterprise Edition, but cannot be used in a commercial environment. Standard Edition does not include features such as table partitioning, online index rebuilds or backup compression.

Express Edition will handle databases up to 10GB in size only. Since the focus of this discussion is on licensing models rather than a blow-by-blow account of feature differences between editions, please see the More Links section for information on the different features of SQL Server and how they compare in order to make the best choice of edition for your organization's needs. The document 'What's New in SQL Server ' has a good summary of new features and their availability between versions, while those of you familiar with these restrictions in R2 and below will note that most restrictions still apply.

See below for Microsoft's one-page summary of the feature sets that come with Enterprise, Business Intelligence and Standard Editions note this is not a complete list :. For example, if your organization employs people, 20 of whom work in the Finance department which has two SQL Server installations on two separate servers, 2 server licenses and 20 CALs would be required.

Starting with , Microsoft recognized the shift onto core-based computing, where two or more cores are used for parallelism and better efficiency on production IT systems. Microsoft decided to capitalize on this and protect the licensing fees which would arguably suffer as focus shifted from increasing the number of processors to increasing the number of cores.

The new core-based system means each core used in a SQL Server installation must be licensed separately with some exceptions, see below. These licenses are sold in 'packs' of two and one pack of two is roughly equivalent in price to the older per-processor license.

Thus, although more licenses are required and other factors such as price adjustment and inflation have affected the price , there may not be a significant difference to the overall price when relicensing for , depending on your circumstances.

Note that hyper threading is ignored for core licensing purposes when licensing physical servers. However - something called 'Core Factor' comes into play here.

Core factor refers to the factor one must multiply by when determining the licenses required, depending on the type of processor one has. AMD processors are licensed differently from Intel ones.

And non-Intel, non-AMD processors are licensed differently still. Here are the rules:. Note that when ordering the licenses, you must divide the number of licenses by two to determine how many 'packs' to order. Don't order double the amount you need by accident! Access to SQL Server databases licensed per server.

Core-based licenses will be sold in two-core packs. Microsoft License Advisor provides list of Microsoft products, programs and their pricing. It give the report for the product and their pricing:. It provides two options for quoting:. First Step is Product Selection. Select the product by clicking on the product that you want e.

Select the Language type as per your requirement. Provide the information for Program selection. If we need any guidance for Volume Licensing products and programs, we can use Guided Quotes which provides two options:. First step is Program Selection. Select the your option and click on Next.