Windows server Standard 2022 license inquiry

Question

If we are using 2x Intel Xeon Silver 4216 per server, how many Windows license do we need?

There are 13 units of server running on dual Intel Xeon Silver 4216 and 1 unit of server running on Single intel xeon silver 4216.

How many licenses do we require?

Answer 1

Hello Koh Jun Hao,

thank you for posting on the Microsoft Community Forums.

For Windows Server licensing, Microsoft uses a core-based licensing model. Each physical processor core needs to be licensed, and there are some specific rules for how this is calculated:

1. Each physical processor needs a minimum of 8 core licenses.
2. Each server must have at least 16 core licenses.

An Intel Xeon Silver 4216 has 16 cores. Since you have 2 processors per server:

• For each server with dual Intel Xeon Silver 4216 processors (16 cores each), that adds up to 32 cores per server.
• You need to license all cores, so you would need 32 core licenses per dual-processor server.
• You have 13 dual-processor servers, so: 13 servers * 32 cores = 416 core licenses.

For the single Intel Xeon Silver 4216 processor server:

• It has 16 cores, which meets the minimum licensing requirement for a server.
• So you would need 16 core licenses for the single-processor server.

Adding these together:

• Dual processor servers: 416 core licenses
• Single processor server: 16 core licenses
• Total core licenses needed: 416 + 16 = 432 core licenses

Thus, you will need a total of 432 Windows Server core licenses for your 14 servers.

Hope it helps.

Best regards,

Lei

Answer 2

Here is another inquiry:-

The server is an OEM server with 1x Intel Xeon Silver 4216, 16 core CPU.

The customer requires the SQL Server licensing to be based on CAL connection.

They are requesting for 1x CAL for now but may increase after evaluating the architect and setup.

Answer 3

There are no engineers dedicated to SQL Server in this forum. In order to be able to deal with your questions quickly and efficiently, I recommend that you repost your questions in the Q&A forum, where there will be a dedicated engineer to provide you with a professional and effective response.

Here is a link to the Q&A forum: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/

Answer 4

So if you have the 1 physical server hosting Hyper-V that has for example 32 cores. You buy 32 cores for that physical server. Then you deploy 4 new Virtual Servers under that host and set each of the VMs to use 2 virtual CPUs (cores). Are you saying we have to buy a minimum of 16 cores for each of those VMs again? Not only overpaying for what you are using, but paying for physical CPU/Cores multiple times.

At that point, you would be paying for a total of 96 cores that will never get used, or exist for that matter.

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