Happy New Year!  I thought I would write about some upcoming changes to SPLA that could drastically effect your costs.  Get your readers on and be sure to bookmark this one!  In this post I will highlight the What – How – When – but also what you can do to proactively to benefit from this change.

Windows 2016

What?  Two versions – Windows Standard and Windows Datacenter.

How?  You mean how it’s licensed?  By core.   It’s licensed by physical core and requires a minimum of 8 cores (not 4 as with SQL) per processor.

When?  My guess will be August/September timeframe.

So now that we have that out of the way, let’s review what it means for you and your business.  Early indications say that 1 core would cost roughly 1/4 of the cost of a single processor license.  There is a minimum of 8 cores that must be licensed, so there is a bit of math involved. If you can calculate the number of cores per processor it would help me calculate what your total new SPLA report would look like.

Other factors in determining your costs would be virtualization.  As with older versions, Datacenter will allow for unlimited VMs.  Are you for certain going to be migrating to Windows 2016 in the near future or are you slowly migrating to newer versions?

If you are NOT going to migrate to Windows 2016 right away and/or not going to migrate ALL your servers at once to Windows 2016, please  contact me at info@splalicensing.com  There’s a reason for this and I have a few tricks up my sleeve that could really help reduce your costs.

I love licensing.  What I do best is find loopholes.  And I certainly found one here.

Thanks for reading,

SPLA Man