I’ve been scouring my notes (old & new), wading through all my previous research and unearthing advice, tips & tricks that have all helped me in some way or another. 

In this series of blog posts, I hope to share a mixture of them with you – some may be simple things you’ve read about a thousand times but the hope is that some of you out there, find something in this series you haven’t heard about or possibly had even forgotten about ! 

Sunday 4th July 2010 (Happy Independance Day to all US readers !) 

Licensing 

1. Since becoming a DB team leader I’ve had to take more of an interest in SQL licensing and to try and enravel the confusion it comes with.   

As our VM infrastructure has continued to grow, I’ve had to ensure the Microsoft heavies don’t come knocking the door ! 

We run SQL Server in a Virtual environment and use the “Per processor” licensing model, – this means you have to buy a Per processor license for every CPU which is available to the Virtual Machine (VM) – regardless of the number of CPUs that are actually installed in the host server. Just be sure to check all your VMs are adequately and legally licensed……….. which I’m sure they all are…….. 

2.  Also note that licensing is per socket. So for licensing purposes, with a dual core CPU, this counts as one processor and not 2 !