Comparing Datacenter Edition Licensing Options

Three options exist for an Enterprise Agreement customer to acquire new licenses for Windows Server Datacenter edition on their Azure Stack HCI hosts. Organizations can license Windows Server VMs through traditional perpetual licensing routes, licensing all physical cores on each host, with or without Software Assurance (SA). The most recent route offered by Microsoft delivers licensing for Windows on a non-perpetual subscription basis, by paying monthly Per-Core licensing for each core in a Stack HCI host. This Windows Server Subscription for Azure Stack HCI delivers a handful of benefits, at a premium price over traditional methods to license a host for Windows Server VMs.

Many organizations running Windows Server Datacenter edition already own existing licenses with SA, resulting in the dramatically lower costs shown in the first column, as new licenses would not need to be acquired to license a host server, just transfer of existing licenses to that Stack HCI server and continued payment of SA. The second column assumes the organization is licensing the entire host but does not opt for SA. The third column combines both, where an organization needs to acquire new licenses and opts for SA. The final column compares the new subscription offer for Windows Server on Azure Stack HCI.