We ve been receiving a number of questions recently about how to properly license an environment with windows server 2016.
Windows 2016 licensing calculator for virtual environments.
To give you a more consistent licensing experience across multi cloud environments we transitioned from processor based licensing to core based licensing for windows server 2019 datacenter and standard editions.
Windows server 2016 core licensing calculator standard edition provides rights for up to 2 virtual oses or hyper v containers when all physical cores in the server are licensed.
Customers can increase 2 vms at a time by licensing all the physical cores in the server again.
Before 2016 we could use the standard edition for very small environments it could make sense as it was a lot cheaper than the datacenter edition and you got two vose virtual operating system environments with each license.
For specific pricing contact your microsoft reseller.
What matters is that you cannot buy windows server 2016 standard or datacenter licenses singly.
They can also be purchased in packs of sixteen but that s not important.
I decided to add a calculator to demonstrate the licensing components of the per core windows server 2016 licensing model.
Total of required oses the total number of operating system environments oses to be run on the server s.
It was a counting game and not very flexible but it was cheap er.
The intent here is to give you a general idea of how many 2 core packs you may need and what it may cost to license windows server 2016.
1 select the edition of windows server 2016 that will be used the first step of the windows server 2016 core licensing calculator is to select which edition of windows server 2016 will be used standard edition or datacenter edition.
Host specification since the windows server 2016 licensing model is core based this tool requires information about the number of servers hosts the number of cpus per server and the number of cores per cpu.
Understand that it connects windows server to the per core cal model and indicates that windows server 2016 licenses can be purchased in packs of two.
Host specification since the windows server 2019 datacenter and standard editions are licensed by physical core this tool requires information about the number of servers hosts the number of cpus per server and the number of cores per cpu.
Our licensing documents.
With windows server 2016 standard edition license and windows server 2016 datacenter edition license you receive rights to two vms as well to an unlimited number of vms respectively.
This tool takes into account the following.
Windows server 2016 has been released.
Things just got a lot more complicated.
Which option we choose may depend mainly on how many virtual machines are needed to run on the server.
