Licensing scenarios

Licensing with 1-year ESUs

Let’s cover a couple of scenarios, where Maroon Balloons are running SQL Server in their own data center. You can see that they’ve got a server with 8 x 8-core processors. There are lots of virtual machines running (several more than you can see!) and they’re shown in pale red to indicate that they’re running the out-of-support SQL Server 2014:

Maroon Balloons have chosen to license the physical server with Enterprise edition licenses which makes sense since there is a large number of virtual machines. They need 64 Enterprise Core licenses with SA (or Software Subscriptions) which are shown in black. When they come to buy the 1-year ESUs, the licensing model used for those must match the underlying licenses and so they would need to acquire 64 Enterprise ESU Core licenses too, which are shown in pale red.

On their second server there are just a few SQL Server 2014 virtual machines running Standard edition and each virtual machine has 4 cores, as shown by the numbers in the circles:

In this scenario, Maroon Balloons decided to just license the virtual machines, and so they assigned 3 x 4 = 12 Standard licenses with SA (or Software Subscriptions) to the physical server, as shown by the black licenses. When they come to purchase the 1-year ESUs, they must make sure that the licensing model of the ESUs matches the licensing of the underlying SQL Server 2014 workloads, and so they would purchase 3 x 4 = 12 Standard ESUs.

Comparing 1-year and Azure Arc ESUs

When you buy ESUs you can choose either the 1-year or the Azure Arc ESUs. They are both based on the price of a SQL Server Core license without SA, but the licensing models are slightly different. The server below is running lots of SQL Server 2025 workloads and a single SQL Server 2014 Standard workload. Maroon Ballons have chosen to license the physical server for unlimited virtualization with 8 x 8 = 64 Enterprise licenses with SA (or Software Subscriptions) since that would be the most cost-effective way of licensing all the virtual machines:

With 1-year ESUs you need to match the underlying licensing of the SQL Server workloads and so Maroon Balloons would need to purchase 64 Enterprise Core ESU licenses to cover the single SQL Server 2014 VM. With Azure Arc ESUs you enable ESUs just for the single VM, and so they would just be charged on a meter for 4 Standard Core ESUs.