Moving our SAP systems to a virtual environment

[tanya_gray]

Can someone please advise, we are currently looking to move our SAP system to a virtual environment and need to know contractually how this will effect our MSSQL licensing if we move to a 5 node cluster, 4 Socket 16 Core AMD Opteron or a 2 node cluster 2 Socket 8 Core Intel Xeon.

Our infrastructure team have told us that we will incur costs from Microsoft depending on what core they build our VM's on.

Our Contract with SAP has the MSSQL costs embedded in our maintenance costs.

Any help would be much appreciated so I can rely this on to our infrastructure guys.

Thanks

T

[Private_Member_12188]

What version of MS SQL Server are you running?

Take a look at the following blog, there are several links pertaining to your question.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/saponsqlserver/archive/2008/07/03/windows-and-sql-server-licensing-under-vir...

An excerpt from that blog

"

Windows Licensing for Software Virtualization

For Windows Server 2003 the following licensing conditions got applied with Windows Server 2003 R2

· Standard Edition: Allows 1 Physcial OR 1 Virtual Instance

· Enterprise Edition: Allows 1 Physical AND 4 additional Virtual Instances

· Datacenter: Allows 1 Physical AND unlimited number of Virtual Instances

For Windows Server 2008 the following conditions apply:

· Standard Edition: Allows 1 Physcial AND 1 Virtual Instance

· Enterprise Edition: Allows 1 Physical AND 4 additional Virtual Instances

· Datacenter: Allows 1 Physical AND unlimited number of Virtual Instances "

[Former Member]

SQL Server Enterprise licensing is indeed now by core, but in some cases you multiply the number of cores by a "core-factor" multiplier.

Here is a link to the MS Document explaining the core factor multiplier:  http://download.microsoft.com/download/9/B/F/9BF63163-D8F9-4339-90AA-EBC9AAFC49AD/SQL2012_CoreFactor...

All processors not mentioned below, multiply by 1

AMD 31XX, 32XX, 41XX, 42XX, 61XX, 62XX Series Processors with 6 or more cores, multiply by 0.75

Single Core Processors, multiply by 4

Dual Core Processors, multiply by 2

For Standard edition, you can license by core, or per Server+CAL, which is basically a license per user connection.