July 5, 2011 at 1:57 pm
I need more details about the datacenter edition. What does it offer that Enterprise doesn't have? Microsoft's web site has some information but I was hoping to get more details. Is it just memory and CPU support difference? What about scalability?
July 5, 2011 at 2:19 pm
this has got some nice comparison tools on the page..i selected Datacenter and Enterprise for example, and then i can scroll through so many comparision options ....
http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/en/us/product-info/compare.aspx
at a glance, it seems to imply that if you can afford something with more than 8 cores, Datacenter can work with any OS you can purchase.
otherwise it looks like Datacenter does everything Enterprise does, except support even bigger hardware.
Lowell
July 6, 2011 at 1:06 am
to add on from Lowell's post, data center is now the licence you need to have unlimited virtual hosts running on a ESX host and not enterprise.
this was to bring the licencing stratigies together for some MS products like Windows Server / SQL and there is possibility that BizTalk could go the same way.
from what our 3rd party licencing consultants told us about the launch of R2 and data center is the following
any enterprise licences you have purchased prior to May 2010 will retain their unlimited virtualisation rights, ONLY if you do not migrate to SQL 2008 R2, you have to stay on 2008. Should you migrate to 2008 R2 your enteprise licences will now only cover you for 4 virtual machines each.
in our case, we had 4 ESX hosts dedicated to SQL with 2 physical CPU's in each, this meant that we purchased 8 enterprise CPU licences prior to May 2010. In the environment we had around 50 virtual SQL servers, so upgrading to 2008 R2 would mean that we needed to either purchase 8 data center licences or 5 more enterprise licences to cover the deficite, but this will only then take us to 52 virtual machines before we had to get another enterprise licence, long story short we havn't upgraded due to budget constraints so we still can run as many VM's as we like as long as its 2008 or below (depending on your licencing model with MS you could be entitled to a step up license which converts enterprise to data center).
if we where to put in a new ESX host today for SQL we would have to purchase 2 data center licences as we have passed the May 2010 cut off, this will also mean that this new ESX host could run R2
so I guess its a question of what are you wanting to do long term with the environment your in, are you planning virtualisation or is it just to gain additional functionality
the only differences I know between the two is the processor/memory limitations are now OS max for data center and you get premium stream insight with data center and only standard stream insight with enterprise.
July 6, 2011 at 1:06 pm
I'm really interested in new functionality, but I can't seem to find a good spec list. I did review the differences on MS web site, but so far it only appears that datacenter edition has greater RAM and CPU support. Nothing else? We're looking for a good scalable platform that could serve our data needs. I need to determine if we should continue with SQL server in the future or go with a different vendor.
Speaking of scalability we would like to know how some of the guys out there in the field do it? Do you have multiple machines? Are you pointing multiple SQL server instances to the same set of read-only data files? How do you distribute large loads where table sizes go beyond 1TB.
I'm asking these questions for planning purposes and I need to figure out the future budget. Our database is still pretty small at around 3TB, but the growth will probably quadrupple over the next year or so.
July 6, 2011 at 1:26 pm
The only feature difference is in StreamInsight, with the amount and latency of events you capture.
The rest is CPU, RAM, and licensing.
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