Pricing the Options for Licensing Hosted SQL Server Enterprise

Licensing Azure-hosted SQL Server Enterprise workloads using traditional perpetual licenses with Software Assurance (SA) can be less expensive than paying Azure hourly rental rates. This illustration compares the cumulative costs (over a four-year span) of licensing an example Azure-hosted SQL Server Enterprise edition workload configured to use 16 virtual cores that runs continuously.

The three illustrated scenarios, descending in cost, are as follows:

• Paying ongoing Azure subscription fees
• Buying SQL Server Enterprise core licenses with SA (L&SA) from scratch specifically to cover the Azure-hosted workload (paying L&SA fees for the first three years and then SA-only thereafter)
• Renewing SA on repurposed core licenses already owned (paying ongoing SA-only fees associated with the existing perpetual licenses).

Only costs directly related to use of SQL Server software are included: under all three scenarios, customers are billed separately for rental of the underlying Windows Server virtual machine and for other services, such as data storage. The Azure subscription fees used in calculations are for a workload hosted in a U.S.-based Azure data center, quoted in U.S. dollars, and are assumed to remain unchanged for the duration of the workload. (The data used is from the Azure “Virtual Machines Pricing Details” page at azure.microsoft.com/pricing/details/virtual-machines/#sql-server.) For perpetual licenses, current U.S. Open No Level prices are used, representing the highest price a U.S.-based corporate customer would pay.