Windows Server 2019 Standard License Cost

Joey on SQL Server

SQL Server 2019 Licensing: How Much Does It Cost and What's Included?

Microsoft has antiseptic the more than confusing elements of SQL Server licensing and extended major benefits to customers. The take hold of is that Software Balls is required to take reward of them.

Related: SQL Server 2019 Is Hither: A Roundup of Its All-time Features

Microsoft merely just officially released SQL Server 2019 at its Ignite conference in Orlando, Fla., but it announced some key changes to licensing a little flake earlier.

Don't worry -- they're all positive changes. Just administrators should know about them all the aforementioned.

I'm But Here for the Pricing
Microsoft has not changed the price of SQL Server since SQL Server 2012 went to a core-based licensing model. Here's the retail pricing for SQL Server 2019:

SQL Server Enterprise Edition: $seven,128 per core
SQL Server Standard Edition: $1,859 per core
SQL Server Standard Edition Server Licensing: $931 plus $209 per named user client admission license (CAL)

Microsoft allows you lot to run any nonproduction workloads under Programmer Edition, which is free, as long as your workloads aren't running production. This includes testing, training and user credence training.

Since well-nigh workloads no longer run on physical machines, virtual machine (VM) pricing matters. Information technology'south effectively the same -- a virtual CPU is treated the same equally a physical CPU -- with ane major caveat. If you lot license all the cores on a given physical host for Enterprise Edition and pay for Software Assurance, y'all tin can run as many VMs of SQL Server Enterprise Edition every bit you can fit on that host.

Software Assurance: A Necessary Cost
Microsoft vaguely defines Software Assurance (or SA) as "a comprehensive Volume Licensing plan that includes an all-encompassing set of technologies, services, rights, and benefits to aid you and your organisation get the most of your investments."

What, in evidently English language, does that get y'all for SQL Server? It gives yous the power to accept your licenses move between machines. Think most a virtual environment where VMs move between physical hosts. SQL Server has always included a "free" passive secondary replica (more on this afterwards). Starting with SQL Server 2014, this required SA. The most well-known benefit is the ability to upgrade to the next release of SQL Server.

These benefits do come with a cost. SA accounts for 25 pct of your licensing cost per year. Back when SQL Server would go 5 years earlier version refreshes, many organizations dropped SA. However, with Microsoft's electric current frequent release cycle, it is almost foolish not to buy it. Between the upgrades and what I discuss in the side by side section on loftier availability and disaster recovery benefits, you'll empathise why.

High Availability and Disaster Recovery
Every bit mentioned earlier, SA e'er entitled yous to a single passive replica. There were some caveats, the biggest existence that the secondary had to be in the aforementioned compute surround every bit the chief.

You might think this meant the same datacenter. Yet, you lot could span datacenters and geographies. What it did mean was that you could not accept your primary replica in your own datacenter and your secondary in Azure without having to fully license the secondary. I e'er idea this was a bad business decision from Microsoft. Subsequently all, what better manner is there to become customers into your deject than offering them a cheap and easy disaster recovery solution?

As of Ignite 2019, that all changed. That restriction went away and along came new benefits. With each purchase of SQL Server with SA, you are entitled to:

One local synchronous replica for high availability.
I remote asynchronous replica for disaster recovery.
You can likewise run backups (full and transaction log) and database consistency checks (DBCC CHECKDB) on either or both of these secondary databases.

Microsoft does require these databases to be in nonreadable format mode, which is configurable through the AlwaysOn Availability Groups feature set.

Effectively, Microsoft has doubled the availability do good that comes with SA and removed the computing surround restriction. If you want one to two nodes in Amazon Web Services (AWS) and 1 disaster recovery node in Azure, Microsoft is happy to have you do that.

To respond another common question, you exercise not take to run SQL Server 2019 to have advantage of these benefits. They are valid for any license of any supported version of SQL Server (which currently is any version starting from SQL Server 2012).

Better Security Comes to Standard Edition
Since SQL Server 2016 Service Pack 1, Microsoft has been calculation numerous programmability and security features to the Standard Edition of the product. In that location had been one exception: Transparent Information Encryption, which encrypts SQL Server information files and backups at remainder so that a database or transaction log file cannot be copied to some other server and opened without a document. (Microsoft did add backup encryption to all editions of SQL Server in 2014.)

The other security feature added to the Standard Edition was cardinal direction for managing encryption keys. Additionally, the PolyBase feature, which is greatly enhanced in SQL Server 2019, is supported on the Standard Edition.

Big Data Clusters: What's the Story There?
There take been a lot of questions around Big Information Clusters (BDC) licensing. This has besides go pretty convenient. Recall, the only fashion to deploy BDC is in Kubernetes containers. This ways that licensing is effectively the same as the VM licensing I mentioned above.

The mode BDC will be licensed is that the primary instance needs to be licensed just like a regular SQL Server. Each core of Enterprise Edition volition entitle you to 8 free cores to run your data and compute nodes. Each cadre of Standard Edition provides ane costless core. Boosted BDC cores for the compute and data nodes are $200 per year.

Summary
Microsoft has just clarified some of the more than confusing elements of SQL Server licensing and opened upwardly some major benefits to customers. The big catch is that you lot need to buy SA to take advantage of these benefits.

If you are already in Azure and y'all are renting your licenses as part of your VM cost, you should know that yous are entitled to these same benefits in that licensing model. The pain signal is with anyone who however has legacy licenses on-premises where they have permit SA expire, or have never had it.

Finally, it'due south nice to see Microsoft existence consequent in its security model across all editions of the product.

About the Author

Joseph D'Antoni is an Builder and SQL Server MVP with over a decade of experience working in both Fortune 500 and smaller firms. He is currently Chief Consultant for Denny Ruby-red and Assembly Consulting. He holds a BS in Computer Information Systems from Louisiana Tech University and an MBA from North Carolina Land University. Joey is the co-president of the Philadelphia SQL Server Users Group . He is a frequent speaker at PASS Meridian, TechEd, Code Camps, and SQLSaturday events.

Source: https://redmondmag.com/articles/2019/11/08/sql-server-2019-licensing.aspx