Licensing for SQL Server Failover Cluster with Availability Group

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Licensing for SQL Server Failover Cluster with Availability Group

Md Moinul Islam 20

We have a SQL server Standard configured as Failover Cluster with Always on High Availability Group. One server is Active and the other is Passive. Now, we have db1 which is replicated to Server2. What we want we want to add a db2 to Server2 and for db2 Server2 will be Active server and Server1 will be the passive server. What are the license requirements for this setup. If I buy another Standard License for Server2, will it be complaint? The SQL server licensing document doesn't answer my above scenario. Please advise.

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Konstantinos Passadis 19,691 MVP

Hello @Md Moinul Islam !

If you have a two-node cluster, each node in the cluster must be licensed with a SQL Server Standard Edition license. This means that you would need to purchase an additional SQL Server Standard Edition license for Server2 in order to use it as the active server for db2.

However, there are some additional licensing considerations for Always On Availability Groups. Each database that is participating in an Availability Group must be licensed with a SQL Server Enterprise Edition license, regardless of the edition of SQL Server that is being used for the Failover Cluster Instance. This means that if you want to use db2 in an Availability Group, you would need to purchase a SQL Server Enterprise Edition license for at least one of the nodes in the cluster.

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Erland Sommarskog 132.1K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator

2023-04-28T20:36:59.81+00:00

Each database that is participating in an Availability Group must be licensed with a SQL Server Enterprise Edition license

From where did you get this? You don't license databases, you license SQL Server as a whole on the machine. In Standard Edition you can create a Basic Availability Group, which is a feature which is only available in Standard Edition.
David I 0 Reputation points

2023-09-24T05:49:12.21+00:00

-You may not need to license both sql servers if you have SA (software assurance).

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/sql-server-blog/sql-server-licensing-high-availability-and-disaster-recovery/ba-p/1212931

-Always on Basic Availability Groups (or Basic Availability Group) for database db1 on Server1 to Server2 is included with SQL Server Standard (2016+). And I think you can protect additional databases on Server1/db2 to Server2 if needed using SQL Server Standard.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/database-engine/availability-groups/windows/basic-availability-groups-always-on-availability-groups?view=sql-server-ver16

-I'm not sure the licensing implications if you do Server1/db1 to Server2 and then Server2/db2 to Server1 which I think is being asked in the original question?

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Licensing for SQL Server Failover Cluster with Availability Group

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