There’s March madness in college basketball and March madness in licensing. College basketball is over, but licensing is just getting started. In this post, I completed a list of the top 5 questions in SPLA. Enjoy!
1. Can we offer a customer dedicated VMs where they can have Windows-admin access? We want to offer the OS-plattform and let the customer handle applications etc themselves
No. You can offer dedicated VMs, but unless a customer is transferring their licenses over to your datacenter, they should not have admin access. Amazon does a good job of explaining this. Check it out here
2. I am looking at licensing SQL in Azure. My question is can we run multiple instances on a single VM or is it 1 instance per VM? How can we reduce our consumption?
Yes. You can run multiple instances on a single VM to reduce the number of VM’s deployed. This works with Azure, AWS, or even your own datacenter.
3. If we have a hypervisor running 2012r2 datacenter edition. Can I install server 2016 on a VM or does the hyper visor also have to be 2016?
You can install the VM with 2016 but the entire host must be licensed by core if you do. (even if you are also running 2012) Remember with 2016, there is an 8- core minimum per physical processor and is sold in packs of 2 cores.
4. I have a production SQL server fully licenced. We will be introducing a second server that will only receive SQL transaction logs throughout the day. It’s not a hot standby, not even a warm standby. Does it require a license?
As long as that server is passive, log shipping is allowed.
5. We are a cloud hosting provider and find it very frustrating in regard to Office 365 and not being able to use SCA. Any help?
There are specific requirements to become CSP Tier 1. I will say Microsoft has made the requirements easier as it pertains to support. If you are having difficulty becoming CSP Tier 1, it may help to look at partnering. Let us know. info@splalicensing.com
Thanks for reading,
SPLA Man
SPLA Licensing 