licensing windows 2019 standard in Esxi environment

Question

I have 10 VMs, in esxi environment, runs in 5 hosts. 4 CPU and 4 Socket each, which it's make sum of 16 logical core for each VM, I am planning to buy windows 2019 standard license, how many license do I need?

what is the exact method to determine the number of licenses in such case?

thanks in advance

Answer 1

Hi

excellent resource here for calculating this:

https://wintelguy.com/windows-server-licensing-calc.pl

Hope this helps,

Thanks

Michael Durkan

• If the reply was helpful please upvote and/or accept as answer as this helps others in the community with similar questions. Thanks!

Answer 2

thank you for help.

But I am a little confused about CPUs per host and cores per CPU parameters, are they referred to physical host or VM?

Answer 3

Hi @samir elfadil ,

per physical host not VM

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(If the reply was helpful please don't forget to upvote and/or accept as answer, thank you)

Regards
Andreas Baumgarten

Answer 4

Hi

see this thread which also covers this question:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/730763/windows-server-2019-host-and-vm-licensing-using-vm.html

You'll need to enter the correct costs for your DataCenter/Standard licences (example quote shown below based on your question):

You can see from the calculations that the more Standard licenses you buy, you get closer to justifying the costs for a Datacenter license.

Hope this helps,

Thanks

Michael Durkan

• If the reply was helpful please upvote and/or accept as answer as this helps others in the community with similar questions. Thanks!

Answer 5

I have 10 VMs, in esxi environment, runs in 5 hosts. 4 CPU and 4 Socket each, which it's make sum of 16 logical core for each VM

Some general info

• Each host needs to be licensed.
• A minimum of 8 core licenses is required for each physical processor and a minimum of 16 core licenses is required for each server.
• Core licenses are sold in packs of two.
• Standard Edition provides rights for up to 2 Operating System Environments or Windows Servers containers with Hyper-V isolation when all physical cores in the server are licensed. For each additional 1 or 2 VMs, all the physical cores in the server must be licensed again.
• DataCenter Edition provides rights for unlimited Operating System Environments or Windows Servers containers with Hyper-V isolation when all physical cores in the server are licensed.

You license each host for the host core count for each two VMs that could potentially run on it. In your example above of 10 VMs you would need to license all cores 5 times if using Standard licensing.

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