May 7, 2008 at 8:35 am
Hi All,
Ive been reading up on licensing today and as with any previous attempt to understand it, im lost again!
There are a couple of scenarios in particular that i am trying to find the licensing needs for.
The first one is for an application with a web front end (limited to a few clients via username/password) which writes to ServerA (SQL) and returns data from ServerA to the client front end. ServerA also writes away data to ServerB (SQL) but does not read anything back (its almost like a replicated scenario). From my understanding the public facing server (A) would need a proc license and server B would need a server license and 1 device CAL.
The second scenario is a more common solution...A web service that is called by a public facing website (written and owned by another company) that receives and parses XML documents into a SQL Database on an internal server. It does not pass any information back to the website from the database at all. Again my understanding would be that this just requires a server license and a single user cal (for the web service).
Any comments/help on this lovely subject would be appreciated.
John
May 7, 2008 at 9:17 am
I would place both of these scenarios under multi-plexing and say that you need to get licenses as if client machines were connecting directly.
These are specific enough that you may want to call your MS sales rep and ask.
May 7, 2008 at 9:29 am
Thanks for the response, i thought they may well fall under the middleware/multi-plexing and read this MS article http://www.microsoft.com/sql/howtobuy/multiplexing.mspx which was clear as mud 🙂
Firstly they say... "A CAL is required for each distinct device or user to the multiplexing or pooling software or hardware front end. This remains true no matter how many tiers of hardware or software exist between the server running SQL Server and the client devices that ultimately use its data, services, or functionality" which seems to suggest each client needs a CAL
..it then goes on to add "An exception to this includes the manual transfer of data from employee to employee. For example, if an employee sends a Microsoft Excel version of a report to another employee, the receiving employee does not require a CAL. An additional exception is communication exclusively between the servers running SQL Server."
Maybe a call to our rep is the best idea 🙂
May 7, 2008 at 9:45 am
I'd agree with the assessment that #2 is a multiplexing scenario. #1 might be interesting though. Depending on what Server B does (or rather doesn't do) with that data. If its sole purpose is to be a static backup of the data, with NOTHING accessing its copy of the data (no reporting, etc...), it might technically fall under the "passive failover node" scenario, in which case NO license is required. Otherwise, it would likely need to be licensed for whatever purpose is accessing its data, but no CAL would be required for the server to server transfer.
Still - better safe than sorry. the call to a licensing specialist might be in order:)
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Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency on my part...unless you're my manager...or a director and above...or a really loud-spoken end-user..All right - what was my emergency again?
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