Some Thoughts on the New Windows Server Per Core Licensing Model

This is a post sent to the SBS2K Yahoo Group.

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Let’s take things from this perspective: Nothing has changed at our level.

How’s that?

We deploy four, six, and eight core single socket and dual socket servers.

We have not seen the need for four socket servers since one can set things up today with eight processors in one 2U space (4 nodes) without too much finagling and end up with way more performance.

Until Intel has conquered the GHz to core count ratio we will be deploying high GHz low core count CPUs for the time being. Not that eight cores is a “low” count in our world. ;)

Most of us will never see the need to set up a dual socket server with more than 12 cores with 16 being not as common a setup for us.

Our sweet spot right now in dual socket server cluster nodes is the E5-2643v4 at 6 cores and 3.4 GHz. For higher intensity workloads we run with the E5-2667v4 at 8 cores and 3.2 GHz. Price wise, these are the best bang for the buck relative to core count versus GHz.

With the introduction of the two node configuration for Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) we have an option to provide high availability (HA) in our smaller clients using two single socket 1U servers (R1208SPOSHOR or Dell R330) for a very reasonable cost. A Datacenter license is required for each node. Folks may balk at that, but keep this in mind:

What does that mean? It means that we can SPLA the Datacenter license whether the client leases the equipment, which was standard fair back in the day, or they own it but we SaaS the Windows Server licenses. Up here in Canada those licenses are about $175 per 16 cores. That’s $350/Month for a HA setup. We see a _huge_ market for this setup in SMB and SME. Oh, and keep in mind that we can then be very flexible about our VM layout. ;)

The licensing change reminds me of VMware’s changes a number of years back where they received so much backpressure that the “Core Tax” changes got reverted. So far, there’s not been a lot of backpressure that we’ve seen about this change. But then, the bulk of the on-premises SMB/SME world, where we spend most of our time, don’t deploy servers with more than 16 cores.

In the end, as I stated at the beginning, nothing has changed for us.

We’re still deploying “two” Server Standard licenses, now in this case with 16 cores per server, for our single box solutions with four VMs. And, we’re deploying “four” Server Standard licenses four our two node Clustered Storage Spaces and Hyper-V via shared storage that also yields four VMs in that setting.

If, and when, we broach into the higher density core counts for our cluster setups, or even standalone boxes, we will cross that bridge when we come to it.

Have a great day everyone and thanks for reading. :)

Philip Elder
Microsoft High Availability MVP
MPECS Inc.
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book
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