SQL Enterprise licence cost avoidance Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise edition licensing changed from per-server (and CALs) to per-core. This makes SQL Server Enterprise on our 16 core blade servers very expensive to licence. To workaround this licencing cost we bought 8 core servers with a higher clock speed.
TL;DR - Save money on SQL Enterprise licensing by choosing fewer cores with faster clock speed.
Benchmarked the new 8 cores @3.5GHz SQL server hardware vs our previous SQL server hardware.
The Microsoft Migration and Assessment Planning (MAP) tool was originally designed to help you plan your migration to HyperV. But the reports it generates are also very useful for the annual Microsoft licensing true-ups.
https://www.microsoft.com/map https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=7826
It can now audit Linux too (with a view to virtualising it on HyperV/Asure) http://blogs.technet.com/b/mapblog/archive/2013/01/29/determine-linux-machine-readiness-to-move-to-a-windows-azure-virtual-machine-using-the-map-toolkit.aspx
Next time you need to gather data for Microsoft licensing, check out The Microsoft Migration and Assessment Planning (MAP) tool.
