SQL Licensing with NUMA

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SQL Licensing with NUMA

abhij33t

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Points: 899
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September 16, 2016 at 6:30 am

#330293

Hi,
If I limit the number of used cores limited on my SQL instance using soft NUMA, does it reduces my licensing cost as well ?
To be specific, I have a 64 Cores hardware NUMA configuration with 4 NUMA nodes(even distribution) with 9 SQL Instances on it. We are planning to implement Soft NUMA and allocate less processors to low CPU using instances.
Thanks for your response.

Viewing 6 posts - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

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spaghettidba SSC Guru Points: 105732 More actions · Answer 1

You always pay for the physical cores in the machine, regardless of the number of cores you assign to sql server with affinity or other means. On that machine you can have as many instances as you want (the limit is 50).

-- Gianluca Sartori

abhij33t SSC Eights! Points: 899 More actions · Answer 2

Thanks for your response. 🙂

Another quick one. When I run these instances on a cluster, does it makes a difference in licensing cost if half of the instance run on one node and another half on second, instead of all running on one node.

spaghettidba SSC Guru Points: 105732 More actions · Answer 3

In the past, passive nodes did not need to be licensed.

With SQL Server 2014, you have to license all the nodes in a cluster, even if they are passive. The exception to that rule is software assurance: if you have software assurance, you don't need to license the passive nodes.

-- Gianluca Sartori

abhij33t SSC Eights! Points: 899 More actions · Answer 4

Thanks a ton for your help :). This means if I have a cluster with 8 Core CPU on both nodes, 1 will have to pay for 16 cores in an active passive configuration !!!:w00t:

spaghettidba SSC Guru Points: 105732 More actions · Answer 5

Yes, unless you have software assurance, which I expect to be much cheaper than SQL Server licenses.

-- Gianluca Sartori