Transferring an SQL Processor License to a virtual hosted environment
- by Andrew Shepherd
My company is currently hosting a service in-house, and we want to move to an externally hosted environment.
We would then be using a virtual server. I understand that this might be spread across multiple machines, but from my perspective as a customer, this layer is abstracted away - I shouldn't know or care about the hardware that the OS is hosted on.
We have a licensed edition of SQL Server 2008. This is one Processor license.
Will it be a violation of the licensing agreement to use this in a virtual environment.
From the reference guide here it says
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.
I'm having trouble getting my head around this. Would I theoretically have to get a license for every processor in this virtual environment (which is effectively impossible because I have no way of knowing how many processors there actually are)? Or can I just say that it's hosted on one "virtual" server, so that's OK?
