Featured Article from Software Licensing

When Microsoft (News - Alert) introduced Windows Server 2012, it moved to a simpler product line-up, with fewer variations in capabilities, which in turn put a greater emphasis on socket count and virtualization rights. Instead of having different Windows Server SKUs with different feature sets, Microsoft went with a Standard and Datacenter edition, both of which supported the same set of features and hardware limits.

Although, as the name suggests, Windows Server 2016 will not be out until sometime during the third quarter of next year, Microsoft has already come up with a new pricing structure for the new release—with more information expected in Q1 2016.

According to a blog posting in Software Monetization, looking at a recent article in ZDNet, what is known is that Microsoft’s Windows Server 2016 will be shifting from a per socket, or per processor to per core pricing. Windows Server 2012 introduced validation in the way Microsoft licensed its server operating system.

The two main editions, Standard and Datacenter, had identical features, differing only in terms of the number of virtual operating system instances they supported. The licenses for both editions were sold in two socket units; one license was needed for each pair of sockets a system contained.

In a way, it seems that Microsoft is possibly taking a step back as Windows Server 2016 returns the functional differences between Standard and Datacenter editions. Unlike the Standard edition, the Datacenter version will include additional storage replication capabilities, as well as a new network stack with richer virtualization options and shielded virtual machines designed to protect the content of a virtual machine from the administrator of the host operating system.

Each system that runs Windows Server 2016 must have a minimum of 8 cores per processor and a minimum of 16 cores (8 packs) per system. Systems that have up to up to 4 processors and up to 8 cores per processor will not really see a change in the overall licensing cost.

However, when you go higher, things can become more expensive. Although the price for a single processor 10 core system will remain the same, if you have two or more sockets populated by 10 core processors, prices really go up, with two or four processors with 10 cores per processor costing 25 percent more to run Windows Server 2016 than they did 2012.

BizTalk, SQL Server and Azure are already licensed on the basis of virtual machine cores rather than sockets, so it seems that Microsoft’s change brings them on an even basis. Wes Miller, who is considered to be an expert on Microsoft licensing policies, believes that the change won’t have a great impact on most customers. However customers using core-dense servers at the very top of the market, which is not the majority and older servers with lots of processors and a low core count each, can expect to be the exceptions.