SQL Server standard license 4 socket per Server or per instance

Question

Using SQL Server standard license. If the physical Windows Server has 8 sockets, can you install two SQL Server instances having one instance using sockets 0..3 and second instance using sockets 4..8?

Answer 1

The license is per server/cores and you can install up to 50 instances per server.

Answer 2

Hi @John Nord

Each edition of SQL Server has two compute power limitations: sockets and the maximum number of cores reported by the operating system. These limits apply to a single instance of SQL Server. They do not limit the servers on which the instance may be deployed.

In fact, deploying multiple instances of SQL Server on the same physical server is an efficient use of the physical server's computing power because there are more sockets and/or cores than capacity constraints allow.

You can refer to this link: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/sql-server/compute-capacity-limits-by-edition-of-sql-server?view=sql-server-ver16.

Best regards,

Aniya