Simple licensing for upgrade question

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Simple licensing for upgrade question

Brian Schaefer

SSC Journeyman

Points: 96
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April 11, 2017 at 11:55 am

#329378

Hi all,
Have per core, STD editions, and Software Assurance.
Installing a new Windows 2012 box with SQL 2014 to replace our shared use SQL2008R2 box.
Once the new server is online, it will take some time to migrate the user DBs/apps off the old.
I'd like to avoid another set of core licenses.
With SA, I believe we're allowed to reassign the license as often as needed within 90 days.
Does this mean, with both the old and new servers online, we have 90 days to migrate the DBs and shut down the old instance, before incurring an additional license?
Thanks for your input.

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Sue_H SSC Guru Points: 90860 More actions · Answer 1

You're probably best off contacting the representative that you worked with on your licensing. Different benefits, arrangements apply to different licensing agreements.

Sue

Mr. Brian Gale SSC-Insane Points: 24800 More actions · Answer 2

I agree with Sue that MS will likely be your best bet. But I know from talking with their licensing experts that they use the term "expert" loosly. I talked to them about Office licensing in relation to MSDN Enterprise license. They told me I could install it anywhere I wanted as long as it was for testing/development purposes and provided me a link to a document that contradicted that. MSDN Enterprise lets you use 1 office license on 1 machine for any purposes.
Took me a while to get it all figured out and to get the licensing expert to confirm what I was reading.

As for the 90 days thing, that sounds very similar to most of MS's other licensing terms (MS Office for example) and what it means in relation to MS Office is that the license is transferrable from 1 user to another but it can only be transferred once every 90 days.

So in your scenario, once you used the new server for production purposes, you would need a license for it. If the old server was being used for production purposes, you'd need a license for it. Thus 2 licenses. If you do a hard cutover, you would only need 1 license, BUT if the launch went poorly and you needed to go back to the old server, you'd either need to wait 90 days OR buy a second license.

Now if this was a VM, it'd be a whole different can of worms. Then you can spin up as many VM's as you wanted with as many production SQL instances as you felt like. Problems here come up with the way you buy your licenses as it is based on the number of cores on the host machine not the VM.

The above is all just my opinion on what you should do.
As with all advice you find on a random internet forum - you shouldn't blindly follow it. Always test on a test server to see if there is negative side effects before making changes to live!
I recommend you NEVER run "random code" you found online on any system you care about UNLESS you understand and can verify the code OR you don't care if the code trashes your system.

Sue_H SSC Guru Points: 90860 More actions · Answer 3

Simple licensing question seems to be a misnomer. 🙂
I worked for a large company that spent I don't know how many millions a year on MS licenses and usually always had premier field engineers and consultants on site. One of the larger development shops around with five or six different environment stages before production. So their agreements were quite a bit different from anything I have ever seen posted. Definitely an edge case but just from that experience, I think I always say contact Microsoft. But I would guess there are likely plenty who have tailored agreements.

Sue