October 5, 2015 at 3:41 am
Currently we have an old HP SAN and use multi-site clustering to give both HA and DR, all usable with a SQL Standard license. We have two active-active DCs. We're are currently evaluating our compute and storage roadmap so might go away from SAN towards hyper-convergence.
Our current SQL project has brought us the wonderful world of MS SQL licensing! If we keep away from a SAN solution, then we really need to go SQL Ent really. We could do a 2 node sync in DC1, with async to DC2, but that means we need two Ent licenses. That's a huge jump up from the Standard license setup with SAN :angry:
Our DCs are connected via 1Gbps with <1ms latency, so we could feasibly stretch the architecture as a 2 node synchronous AAG to avoid the extra licensing.
Or, we could have 2 node in DC1, with some form of replication (like Zerto) to DC2.
Interested to hear how you guys minimise SQL licensing costs.
Paying hundreds of thousands of pounds for licenses for servers that will be used once in a blue moon seems a hard sell.
Appreciate your help.
October 5, 2015 at 4:04 am
We license both DC's with enterprise edition at the hyper visor level to give us unlimited visualization rights across the compute power of the hosts, this is dramatically cheaper than licensing each VM individually.
Also need to also remember to purchase SA with your licenses as only one passive server is allowed per SA licensed server.
If your licenses don't have SA then the passive needs to be licensed also.
October 5, 2015 at 4:40 am
I'm not sure we have enough SQL to justify the host model. I assume you have hypervisor HA in both sites? Do you license all hosts? What's the situation if a DB or instance fails onto another host?.... do all other servers/dbs/instances need to fail over to that same host in order to keep within license terms?
October 5, 2015 at 4:47 am
As all the hosts in the SQL hyper visor pool are licensed it doesn't matter about VM movement as they move between hosts that are fully licensed.
October 5, 2015 at 5:07 am
So, if we had two dual-4 core proc servers in DC1, and likewise in DC2 (for DR only), the licensing would be roughly as follows?:
8 physical cores in each server
2 hosts in DC1
16 total physical cores in DC1
32 virtual cores usable with hyper-threading
SQL EE price per physical core £8000
16 x £8000 = £128000
If I then failed a single VM over to DR, would all other VMs have to follow?
Or do I need to license all 4 hosts (2 in each DC) as the only way to have the flexibility the move SQL services between all hosts and all DR sites as I want?
Thanks
October 5, 2015 at 5:17 am
Its the usual DBA answer of "it depends", it all goes on how the infrastructure will be built and how you want to do HA/DR
As with anything as complicated and as legal binding as licensing, I always detail to speak to Microsoft or your re seller to get it from the horses mouth.
In our setup, all hosts in both DCs are licensed as we use 3+ node Always On with read only secondaries so we serve data to all applications from each DC as we run an Active/Active DC setup.
Viewing 6 posts - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
You must be logged in to reply to this topic. Login to reply