MS SQL Server 2016 Evaluation edition want to activate it.

Question

Hi,
I have download the SQL server 2016 SP2 from Microsoft Site as evaluation edition. It running now and i am willing to activate it. Please help me to understand which version exactly i am running so that i can request the same license for activating.
If i run Select @@Version it gives below output.
Microsoft SQL Server 2016 SPC (KB4052908) - 13.0.5026.0(x64) Microsoft Corporation Enterprise Edition (64 bit) on windows server 2016 Standard 10.0 (64 bit)
i am planning to order single license for this as SQL 2016 r2 standard license.
Please advise.
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Buy a license for SQL Server Standard Edition. I don't know if you can buy one for SQL 2016 specifically, or they only sell licenses for SQL 2019. But if so, the downgrade should not be a problem. (Then again, why you go with a version that runs out of mainstream support later this year?)

Once you have the installation media, run Setup and select Edition Upgrade to upgrade from Evaluation Edition to Standard Edition.

Make sure that you still have the same version number after the installation. If it is lower, download service pack 2 and reapply it. (I don't do these operations very often, so I don't know exactly how it works.)

You should also download and install the most recent Cumulative Update for SQL 2016 SP2 which is CU17 if I remember correctly.

Before running the installation, you may want to run this in your database(s):

SELECT * FROM sys.dm_db_persisted_sku_features

So that you have used thing that will not work in Standard Edition.

Note that there is no "activation" per se.

Answer 2

Hi @mohdashraf azam ,

In addition to the select @@VERSION command, you can also check the ERRORLOG of SQL Server Evaluation edition instance (the version information is output at the beginning).

The SQL Server 2016 Evaluation(called as Enterprise Evaluation) has all the features of the Enterprise Edition, and is only used for testing purposes and should not be installed and used in a production environment. This is similar to the SQL Server Developer Edition, but the evaluation edition only supports a 180-day trial.

The process of performing SQL Server Evaluation activation is called edition upgrade in SQL Server. To upgrade, you need to have installation media of the destination version/edition.

Upgrading from Evaluation (a free edition) to any of the paid editions(Enterprise or Standard) is supported for stand-alone installations.But is not supported for clustered installations. This limitation does not apply to stand-alone instances installed on a Windows Failover Cluster participating in an availability group.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/database-engine/install-windows/supported-version-and-edition-upgrades?view=sql-server-ver15#-edition-upgrade

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