Microsoft announced recently that they were changing the way licensing works for HA and DR situations. I think this is a great change, and the summary is:
- You can have up to 3 other un-used secondaries for free
- You can a sync on-prem replica, async on prem replica, and a remote DR replica.
- You can run DBCC, backups, monitor resource data on the secondaries
This is a huge change, mostly because most of us expected these would be acceptable uses already, but they weren’t. And many of us had to go ask for more licensing money.
The Caveat
There is a caveat here, actually two. You need:
- Software assurance
- A supported version of SQL Server
Those two things mean you need to be under a support contract, but also that this benefit isn’t just SQL Server 2019, but back ported to all supported versions.
That’s good new.