Tech Insights 2011 - Useful FREE WIndows Tools to assist in a Windows 7 Migration

Tech Insights 2011 was awesome... as always. The session that I delivered this year was on sharing Useful Tools to Assist in Assessment, Deployment and Managing a Windows 7 Infrastructure.

Here is the slide deck from my session:

Useful FREE Windows Tools

Also.. recorded it if you want to view it:



If the video does not display well, View it in Vimeo

Check out www.techinsights.my for details about the event and announcements for Tech Insights 2012

SQL 2012 New Licensing scheme under virtualization

Looking at SQL Server licensing today, we could actually save some money based on how it is licensed under a Virtualization scenario. An example is as follows:

SCENARIO: You have a 2 X Quad Core Processor in the Host Server, and had SQL Server installed in a virtual machine. In the Virtual Machine, you assigned 4 Virtual CPUs.

LICENSING CALC: To license the SQL Server on Processor licensing, we would calculate as follows:
                                  
                                   [no. of Virtual CPUs] / [no. of total physical cores] = 4 / 8 = 0.5
                                  
                                   Round up the result to the nearest whole number = 1      
                                  
                                   This means that you would need to license it with 1 Processor License

This is huge savings as you would only need to purchase 1 Proc license even though the Host Server had 2 Processors.


This will change in the upcoming launch of SQL Server 2012.

SQL Server 2012 will have 2 licensing models.

1. The traditional Server + CAL licensing
2. The new Core based license

Under this new licensing structure, when purchasing the neccessary license for SQL Server in a Virtual Machine, you would have to purchase it based on the no. of Virtual Cores assigned to the VM. Therefore if you had assigned 4 Cores, then you would have to purchase SQL Server Enterprise 2012 with 4 Cores. Microsoft currently states also that the minimum purchase for Cores type structure is 4 Cores.

I am waiting on the actual pricing to see how this plays out on a costing play field. Then we can make our conclusions on how this will affect Virtualization based SQL installations.

Here is the official Microsoft site: http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/en/us/future-editions/sql2012-licensing.aspx