Licensing virtual machines

The rules for licensing servers in a virtualized environment are exactly the same as for Windows Server 2022 but we’ll look at some examples here specifically for System Center 2022.

In common with Windows Server, up until October 2022 the only option for licensing System Center to manage virtual machines was to license the physical server to receive an entitlement to manage a certain number of virtual machines. However, for customers with eligible licenses there’s now an option to choose to license the individual virtual machines. Both of the options are explained below. 

Licensing the physical server

Let’s consider a physical server with 2 x 16-core processors on which 4 virtual machines need to be managed. Every physical core needs to be licensed so we would need to assign 32 Server ML Core licenses to this device. Having assigned the licenses to the server the customer then receives rights to manage a certain number of virtual machines, and in the case of the Datacenter edition, it’s an unlimited number. Note that it doesn’t matter how many virtual cores are assigned to the virtual machines – it’s the total number of virtual machines running that is important in this licensing model.

However, in common with Windows Server 2022 Standard, licensing the physical server completely with System Center 2022 Standard Server MLs only allows 2 virtual machines to be managed. Thus, to license this scenario you would license the physical server again and assign a total of 64 System Center 2022 Standard Core MLs to the server.

Licensing individual virtual machines

From October 1, 2022 customers with active Software Assurance on their System Center 2022 Standard or Datacenter Server ML Core licenses have a choice as to how they license System Center to manage virtual machines. They can either license by physical server, as described above, or may license by individual virtual machines which is what’s covered in this section. 

When you choose this licensing model, you need to know the number of virtual cores assigned to the virtual machine since each virtual core needs to be licensed, with a minimum of 8 System Center Server ML Core licenses. If a virtual machine had 12 virtual cores, for example, you would assign 12 Core licenses to it. Note that the licenses themselves are attached to the physical server – a fact that becomes important when we look at licensing a server farm in the next section.