Consolidation Without Virtualization-Related Licensing Costs

Many organizations will want to run multiple copies of SQL Server on the same computer to improve server utilization and simplify management, among other benefits. While hardware virtualization technologies like Microsoft’s Hyper-V and VMware’s ESX are a common way to consolidate a number of SQL Server workloads onto a single host, an alternative technique for SQL Server called instance-level consolidation can make SQL Server much less costly to license.

With hardware virtualization, multiple copies of SQL Server share a common physical host server but run in separate virtual machines (VMs), with each VM having its own single Windows Server installation, called an operating system environment (OSE). Each SQL Server Standard (and Workgroup) processor or server license provides the right to run SQL Server in one OSE, and thus one VM. Each Enterprise edition processor or server license permits up to four VMs on the licensed server, and each Datacenter processor license permits an unlimited number of VMs.