Common

ESUs are purchased for SQL Server 2014 workloads running on a customer’s own servers, or in a partner infrastructure, and there are two ways to buy them: As 1-year ESU licenses On a Pay-As-You-Go ESU meter via Azure Arc The…

A physical-core license is the mechanism by which you tell Azure Arc to not focus on the virtual cores of a virtual machine, but instead to focus on the cores of the physical server because you want to license ESUs…

If customers decide to run their out-of-support SQL Servers in Azure, then Extended Security Updates are free for three years. This includes virtual machines running on Azure multi-tenant hardware which are being paid for on a Pay-As-You-Go basis or those…

If you’ve paid for Azure Arc ESUs for production servers, then you can also use ESUs on disaster recovery servers. In addition, if you’ve got a dev/test server which is licensed through a product key obtained from a Visual Studio…

Once Azure Arc ESUs are enabled for a virtual machine, patches can be automatically deployed as they’re released.

Billing for the Azure Arc ESUs is through an Azure Subscription. An Azure Subscription is always linked to a payment mechanism – so the EA, MCA-E, or a CSP partner – and that’s where the Azure Arc ESU charges will…

In the same way as the 1-year ESUs, the pricing of the Azure Arc ESUs is based on the price of a Core license without Software Assurance. However, you don’t buy a license or a subscription, you enable ESUs for…

When you connect a SQL Server machine to Azure Arc, you can then enable Azure Arc ESUs for that machine. This is done from the Configuration panel within the machine’s Properties page, as shown below; the screenshot is taken from…

Licensing ESUs by virtual core Let’s cover a couple of scenarios, where Maroon Balloons are running SQL Server in their own data center. They’ve licensed the SQL Server 2012 workloads appropriately, and are now interested in enabling ESUs for those…

Azure Arc ESUs are purchased in addition to the licenses that have already been purchased to license the SQL Server 2012 workloads themselves, which must be qualifying licenses. Originally, on launch, the SQL Server 2012 Azure Arc ESUs were only…