Downsides to OEM and Retail SQL Server Purchases

Customers can purchase SQL Server from a hardware manufacturer (OEM) preinstalled on new server hardware or purchase a classic shrink-wrapped retail package of SQL Server through a reseller. However, even if an attractive price can be secured from these channels, buying SQL Server through volume licensing programs is almost always the most preferable option for several reasons.

Both OEM and retail licenses must be tracked manually. Volume licenses are automatically tracked at Microsoft’s volume licensing Web sites. These sites, accessible to customers, tabulate most or all of a customer’s Microsoft license purchases across multiple resellers.

Only volume programs offer all editions of SQL Server. Enterprise, Datacenter, Developer, and Web editions are not available through OEMs, and Web edition is not sold through retail.

OEM and retail licenses carry inferior license reassignment and downgrade rights. In the case of OEM-acquired SQL Server Workgroup and Standard licenses, reassignment to another device is not permitted—the OEM license is permanently assigned to the server with which the customer acquired the license. Retail SQL Server Enterprise and Datacenter edition licenses also carry more restrictive reassignment rights than their volume counterparts. These retail licenses can be reassigned from one physical server to another only once every 90 days; that is, licenses can be moved at most four times per year. Volume licenses for Enterprise and Datacenter edition, in contrast, can be moved at any time within a server farm—an important capability for many virtualization scenarios. Furthermore, Retail and OEM SQL Server 2008 R2 licenses provide the right to downgrade to a prior version, but unlike volume licenses, they don’t allow edition downgrades, which are useful in some virtualization scenarios. In other words, while a SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise edition license purchased via volume licensing allows a customer to run instances of Standard instead of Enterprise, a retail copy of the same product does not.