I mean enterprise with all of the cost and trouble that the word “enterprise” entails in our modern IT vernacular. In case you were confused, high availability is officially an enterprise feature. In short, Software Assurance (SA) is a yearly fee that customers pay to get access to the latest and greatest versions of products as well as unlock additional features that may have complex deployment scenarios. Head over to the SQL Server 2014 Licensing Datasheet at the bottom of page three, it reads “Beginning with SQL Server 2014, each active server licensed with SA coverage allows the installation of a single passive server used for fail-over support.” The passive secondary server doesn’t need to have a complete SQL Server license, but Software Assurance is a pricey pill to swallow. If you want to have a standby node, you’ve got to pony up and buy software assurance. Log shipping, mirroring, and even failover clustering allowed for an unlicensed passive node, provided that the passive node didn’t become the primary for more than 28 days. Prior to SQL Server 2014, many shops were able to deploy a single standby server without licensing SQL Server. Standby Servers Require Software Assurance Of course, it makes even more sense to just license the entire VM host… How much money would it take to give you assurance? Having a number of Server + CAL license for 1 or 2 vCPU instances can be much more cost effective than having a large number of core based licensed. This can make a lot of sense when there are small, single application SQL Servers that cannot be consolidated for security reasons. Microsoft are highly recommending that VMs be licensed as Server + CAL (rather than per core). It’s only for Standard Edition and BI Edition. You can follow along in the SQL Server 2014 Licensing Datasheet… if you dare.
While I don’t work for Microsoft legal, I do have a PDF reader and a web browser. With the release of SQL Server 2014, we get to learn all kinds of new licensing changes.