Mythbusting - How many instances can you install on your server?
I was in discussion with the StreamInsight team about the licensing of the StreamInsight engine and was getting my knickers in a twist about the fact that you could host multiple SI engines with multiple apps with only 1 SQL license and thus work around the processing limitation on Enterprise edition and lower. My issue was that I thought that this was dodgy with respect to the licensing because you effectively had multiple instances and Standard edition and lower you had to license each instance.
So having wiped the egg off my face I can now point out to anyone that thought the same as me, you’re wrong.
In SQL 2000 up until April 2003 you had to license each instance, but since then you don’t. How on earth did I miss that for 7 years.
That means from a consolidation perspective you could consolidate lots of instances onto a dualx8 core server with 256GB Ram, pay for 1x2 processor standard edition license and have 4 instances running each with 64GB ram. How cool.
If you still don’t believe me read this from the SQL 2008 licensing overview http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/e/6/1e68f92c-f334-4517-b610-e4dee946ef91/2008%20SQL%20Licensing%20Overview%20final.docx
“When licensed Server / CAL
Workgroup and Standard editions now allow you to run any number of instances of the server software in one physical or virtual operating system environment on the licensed server at a time. Previously, only the Enterprise edition of the Server license allowed multi-instancing. This is a great incentive for customers to adopt the Server/CAL model.
For Enterprise edition, for each server to which you assign a software license, you may run, at any one time, any number of instances of the server software in one physical and any number of virtual operating system environments on that server.
When licensed Per Processor
With Workgroup, Web, and Standard editions, for each server to which you have assigned the required number of per processor licenses, you may run, at any one time, any number of instances of the server software in physical and virtual operating system environments on the licensed server. However, the total number of physical and virtual processors used by those operating system environments cannot exceed the number of software licenses assigned to that server
For enterprise edition there is an added option: if all physical processors in a machine have been licensed, then you may run unlimited instances of SQL server 2008 in one physical and an unlimited number of virtual operating environments on that same machine”
You need to be aware that with SQL 2008 R2 the situation changes for EE edition in that you are limited to 4 virtual servers.