Hello

I'm a network administrator at a small/medium business and we are currently thinking of virtualize our four servers on two ML350 servers. We have three 2012r2 licenses (think it's standard lisences). Before we decide to do this I have to find out how much it will cost us. However I have some small problems understanding the total cost of having two physical servers running Hyper-V where one of them will be the main host running all the four virtual servers and the other one for failover.

This is how I think it works:

I need to have four 2012r2 standard lisences in order to run all the four virtual servers on both of the physical Hyper-V hosts, then I will also need four server licenses for the four virtual servers running. So a total of 8 server licences. Is this correct? If not, what do I need? 

It depends :-)

1. You are licensing hosts only. (There are no licenses for VM! You have virtualization rights.)

2. One license is valid for server with up to two CPU.

3. You can have two VMs or only one VM. If your host supports VM only (Hyper-V role, backup,...), then two VMs are valid. If your host were domain controller, the only one VM is allowed.

4. If you have two physical servers with up two CPU and two standard licenses, then you can have up to 4 VMs.

5. So if you use hosts for any purposes, the you need four licenses and you can install three VMs on every of both hosts.

HTH

Milos

• Edited by Milos Puchta 16 hours 53 minutes ago Typo
• Marked as answer by Marius S Bjerkeset 1 hour 45 minutes ago

I'm still quite confused. What I need to know is if I need licenses for my VM's or if the VM's are licensed when I got enough R2 Standard licenses? Will I need a separate server license for my VM's? Let's say I intend to install a host with only Hyper-V and backup role on it. The two VM's I install on it will be two Win Server VM's. Will I only need one Win Server 2012 R2 Standard license to enable all of these or will I need a Standard license for the host and two server licenses for the two VM's too?

• Edited by Marius S Bjerkeset 51 minutes ago

OK Let me try and explain even though Milos has it basically right. 

Window Server standard edition give you the rights to run 2 x VMs on a given physical host in your worst case scenario you need to have all 4 of your VMs running one host so you need 2 server licenses to for that on each host.  The other way to look at this is that you can use your license to license the guests in which case that's two per license as well and you run the free hyper-V server as the host (or VMware the rules are the same). 

Now this assumes you don't have any roles on the host except Hyper-V, and yo9u mentioned backup running on the host which changes the game and is actually not a great idea as you may get contention between the backup jobs and the VM competing for access to storage.

The other problem  I see on the horizon is that you are capped at 4 VMs per server in this scenario, and although I am not a salesperson, enterprise edition gives you unlimited VMs per host.

Also Note both server and enterprise edition are licensed per 2 x CPUs so if you have dual processor (NOT cores) then you just need the one license of whichever.

This fact sheet is fairly easy to understand and is the official one from Microsoft

file:///C:/Users/Andrew/Downloads/Windows_Server_2012_R2_Licensing_Datasheet.pdf

If that doesn't help then if you are in the UK contact me directly

@deepfat