By: Allan Hirt on November 4, 2011 in AlwaysOn, Availability Groups, High Availability, Hyper-V, Licensing, Live Migration, SQL Server 2012, SQL Server Denali
It was hard to miss the licensing and edition announcements for SQL Server 2012 yesterday. This post won’t touch on those too much. Others (such as Denny Cherry’s blog post or Geoff Hiten’s blog post as examples) cover that pretty well. I will say these three things, though:
The one thing which some may have noticed is the line on the bottom of the chart linked above for editions: Enterprise has “Advanced” for high availability and the other two have “Basic”. What exactly does that mean? Thanks to MS for helping me to clarify. The list below is as things are today. Things may or may not change between now and whenever SQL Server 2012 RTMs.
Basic
Advanced (which includes everything you get in Standard/BI plus …)
In essence, outside of the new AlwaysOn availability groups feature exclusively in Enterprise, the split is pretty much what you get now: a more feature rich high availability set in the top edition, and less in the others. Don’t let the names Advanced and Basic fool you – it’s just marketing terminology (much like AlwaysOn [with no space] is a branding thing).
The only slight bit of disappointment I have to be honest is twofold:
These are not things to start a letter writing campaign to Microsoft. I’m just expressing my own personal opinion as someone who is obviously close to the HA feature set. I still think SQL Server 2012 has a compelling offering for most that if you are starting to consider upgrades or new implementations, seriously start evaluating it in its current form (CTP3).
Do I Need the Enterprise (or Datacenter) Edition of Windows for SQL Server 2012?
The answer to this one is “it depends”. If you plan on deploying AlwaysOn availability groups or failover clustering, yes. I know I haven’t talked about availability groups much but I’ve been working with them for awhile and some of what I know is still under NDA and I’d rather be able to tell everything. Anyway, availability groups require that the OS is clustered but SQL Server does not need to be (but you can cluster it if you want). Based on what I said above for Basic vs. Advanced, if you are not using SQL Server Enterprise, you won’t need to worry about choosing EE or DC for Windows anyway since you won’t be getting the availability groups feature.
The need for at least Windows EE has been a bit of a controversy for some as they want to, say, do clustering with SQL Server Standard but need a higher edition of Windows since Windows Standard does not support failover clustering – it’s not a 1:1 ratio (so-to-speak). Is there a cost difference? Absolutely. However if you look at the cost of the Standard vs. Enterprise editions of Windows, it’s not the same difference at all as it is with SQL Server in terms of price. I know that even a minor difference in the amount could be a huge one for some companies; I’m not blind to economics. But if you plan on implementing SQL Server 2012 EE, it would be almost silly not to deploy at least the equivalent edition of Windows since you wouldn’t be able to take advantage of a great new feature like availability groups.
Supported Platforms
Now is as good a time as any to remind you about the blog post I wrote back in June which talks about the intended platforms you can deploy on. My thoughts there haven’t changed either, especially around supporting (or not) 32-bit.
That’s it for now … hope everyone has a great weekend!
So can we setup AlwaysOn without doing any clustering?
You don’t need to create a failover clustering instance (but you can if you want). However, you do need to cluster Windows.
Hi ,
Do i need a license for every node added in a sql server 2012 cluster ?
thanks.
I m talking about an enterprise edition
It depends. Your best bet is to look at the licensing info on Microsoft’s site for 2012 (http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/en/us/get-sql-server/how-to-buy.aspx), and then ask your licensing person.
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