Book Image

Designing Hyper-V Solutions

By : Saurabh Grover, Goran Svetlecic
Book Image

Designing Hyper-V Solutions

By: Saurabh Grover, Goran Svetlecic

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Designing Hyper-V Solutions
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Licensing – Windows Server 2012 / Windows Server 2012 R2


Microsoft made an aggressive move with licensing from Windows Server 2012 and maintained the same rhythm with Windows Server 2012 R2. They just came out with two primary editions: Standard and Datacenter. The word "Enterprise" was deprecated from the listing. The other two editions, namely "Essentials" and "Foundation" are a small business with almost no VOSE (Virtual Operating System Environment). Our focus will be on primary editions only, since our agenda is virtualization.

Note

POSE stands for Physical Operating System Environment, wherein the running instance is on the physical server. VOSE indicates a virtual machine instance.

In principle, the "Standard" and "Enterprise" editions carry the same features as each other. However, the Enterprise version offers unlimited VOSE, and the Standard edition licenses only two virtual machine instances, or VOSE. For each edition, the license covers two processors or sockets (not cores). If the server has more than two processors, then for each edition, one additional license has to be purchased. An additional license purchase for the Standard edition can also provide for two more VOSEs as well as two processor sockets. Take a look at the the following table to understand this better:

Licensing examples

Datacenter licenses required

Standard licenses required

One 1-processor, non-virtualized server

1

1

One 4-processor, non-virtualized server

2

2

One 2-processor server with three virtual OSEs

1

2

One 2-processor server with 12 virtual OSEs

1

6

In the previous section, we looked at one of the new features, called Automated Virtual Machine Activation (AVMA). If the host OS is Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter, then this feature can be utilized via the SLMGR AVMA key on the virtual machine in the same way as the KMS client key. The virtual machine can be deployed as a template. As stated earlier, this is only available for Windows Server 2012 R2 Server versions as VMs only.

Note

This section is not a licensing guide, but an effort to help learners understand the basics. For more information, always contact your Microsoft reseller or refer to http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/buy/pricing-licensing.aspx.