Windows 2012 Licencing Simple Answer Please!

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Hi Guy's,

I need a simple answer if you can!

Looking to upgrade some of our infrastructure this year to 2012 and appropriately licence it. To keep this simple I'm going to say that I can either get 2012 Std or Datacentre. Now if I were to buy 2012 std I'd be licenced to run 2 x VM's on that host. My query is that if I already have licences for additional servers such as 2008r2 std could I run an additional 2008 vm on the server in addition to the 2 x vm's included in the host licence?

To simplify - 1 x host, 3 x vm's. 2 x covered by host licence 1 x by additional licence.

Legal?

 

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Not an expert as such here but i see how you come to that

Ed

 

Check with your LAR but as it currently stands if you purchase 2012 Std you have downgrade rights to 2008 Ent but if you use that license to run more than 2 VMs on a 2012 host you do indeed require an additional Std license (working with a LAR over the last couple of days and these exact scenarios cropped up).

 

Slight wording difference but from my understanding you're correct.

Server 2012 gives you 2x VM licences and 1x host license to use Server 2012 on the host running the Hyper-V role only.

As long as you have licenses for other OS's you can then put as many VM's on it as you want (that you're licensed for).

So to lay yours out

2012 Host (covered by the 2012 Std license)
-> VM1 (Server 2012 covered by the 2012 Std license)
-> VM2 (Server 2012 covered by the 2012 Std license)
-> VM3 (Server 2008 covered by your existing license)

If for some reason you want to do it the other way around this is still valid:

2008R2 Host (covered by the 2008 Std license)
-> VM1 (Server 2012 covered by the 2012 Std license)
-> VM2 (Server 2012 covered by the 2012 Std license)
-> VM3 (Server 2008R2 covered by your existing 2008R2 license)

 

So would a '2012 Standard' license give you 4x 2008R2 guests on 1x 2008R2 host, the same as a '2008 Enterprise' license would?

I'm always impressed by the sheer complexity of Microsoft's licensing. We have a SPLA and a HVS agreement, which only makes things more confusing.

 

No, it's downgrade rights, so you could purchase that 2012 Std license and downgrade to 2008 R2 Enterprise and then run those 4 guests, if you only have 2012 to run HyperV on and you need to run 4 guests you would need to purchase 2 2012 Std licenses.

As I said speak to your LAR to get more information but this is the discussion we had last week.

 

This is where the confusion arises.

I have an existing 2008R2 licence, can I assign that licence to a third VM without having to buy an additional 2012 std licence?

(depending on the figures that my reseller comes back to me with I may just go Datacentre anyway to avoid all confusion!)

 

Is it a Std or Ent and are you running 4 VMs on it if its Ent?

 

I don't think that is relevant, at the moment (it may be though).

I'll see if I can explain:

The existing server runs 2008R2 ent. it has 4 x vm's running on it.
The VM's will not be moving anywhere (deleted) and the host that carries the licence will be decommissioned.
New server will be licenced with 2012 std 1 x licence. It will be running 2 x VM's not necessarily 2012, but covered under the hosts licence for 2 x VM's.
Can I take my 1 x 2008R2 Enterprise Licence and run a 2008R2 VM?

Finding it very difficult to get a straight yes or no from MS and our reseller hasn't yet come back to me.

 

OK, if you have an existing license that will go spare because it's decommissioned and then purchase a 2012 Std license then you should be entitled to running 2vm's on the 2012 server, if you wanted to use more then you would need to purchase more 2012 licenses.

However if you then used downgrade rights on the 2012 Std license to 2008 Ent. and used your existing 2008 R2 license you would be entitled to running 8 VMs across both HyperV hosts.

Your current 2008 R2 licenses doesn't allow you to upgrade to 2012.

 

Thank you Simon.

This has cleared up what I thought was the case.

Regardless of how many licences I may have going spare when servers are retired in order to run more than 2 x VM's on my 2012 std server I will need to purchase additional 2012 std licences.

The whole purpose of the upgrade is to make use of Hyper-V3, so downgrading would be pointless.

Based on figures I've now seen though its cheaper to run multiple standard licences assigned to a single server than it is to buy Datacentre.

 

This is from my reseller:

So apparently I can run my extra VM!

Why do MS feel the need to make things so complicated! :hhhmmm

 

Only if you are fully decommissioning the existing 2008 R2 server, if it's an existing server and still going to be running then you're going to have issues.

Obviously you can use unused OS licenses to run that OS on a virtual platform but you won't have the same amount of virtual licenses, so for example you couldn't use the 2008 R2 license as an addon to the 2012 license to run an additional 4 VMs, only a single OS license.

 

Deleted.