Windows Server 2008 Enterprise edition and Virtualisation

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I get quite a few questions about virtualising SQL Server and typically today this is on VMWare so yesterday I went along to find out more at the VMWare London User Group. 

In the current world of computing, vendors compete with everyone but also has alliances with everyone (a bit like the UN really!).  So I was made to feel really welcome by the organisers and the Vmware and Cisco staff there. and being a good citizen I didn’t want to bang on about how amazing Hyper-V, but of course if anybody’s asking then it would be rude not to explain what it is.

For example I was asked about how much Hyper-V costs on top of Windows Server 2008. This is a difficult question as when you buy a copy of Windows Server 2008 or R2 what this gives you is the rights to 4 x virtual machines on one physical server each running the version of windows server you bought or any earlier one.  So that makes sense for Vmware ESX, as you already bought the hypervisor, but suppose you want to buy the Hyper-V thing and use the Microsoft platform?

Well the strange thing here is that you already bought Hyper-V when you bought Windows Server 2008 and you can do 2 things:

  • Install Windows Server 2008 as the physical operating system setup Hyper-V (it’s a role) and nothing else.  You can then run your four vm’s on that server without any extra licenses. 
  • However if you decide to us the physical/host  operating system for other tasks as well as Hyper-V e.g. a domain controller file & print etc. then you only get to run 3x virtual machines on it.

Hopefully that makes sense but if you need more information you can contact our licensing expert Emma Healey

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