On Wednesday the Auckland SQL User group will be meeting again.  I’ll be there and I encourage you to come along if you are interested in getting involved in the community and sharpening your skills.

This week there will be two presentations:

- Dave Dustin – Wearing multiple hats – being a DBA and a developer

- Geoff South - Working with the rest of the IT department to diagnose and resolve issues

I’m looking forward to hearing Daves session.  SQL Server DBA’s tend to be broader in their skill set than Oracle DBA’s so it will be interesting to hear his take on how this works out.

If you are in Auckland and interested in coming along, it would be great to meet you there.

The event starts at 6pm and will be followed by drinks and pizza.  Full details and registration is available here.

Hopefully I’ll see you there!

Disclaimer: I’m not a licensing expert, so check with your licensing experts to clarify licensing for your environment.

I’ve had a couple of questions today about licensing SQL Server in a virtual environment, so I thought I’d put up a little information on the topic.

Last year I published some information about our virtualization support for SQL Server, so if you haven’t already read it, it will fill out the story below.

Physical or virtual CPU?

If you have been in the market for a computer over the last few years you would have heard of things like HyperThreading (HT) and Multi-Core CPU’s. When running in a Virtual machine, SQL Server is licensed based on either the virtual CPU’s or the physical CPU’s.  We don’t differentiate between HT and cores, although cores do come into the equation in some cases.

Standard and Workgroup.

With SQL Server Standard, Web and Workgroup editions (whats the diff?) you purchase a license per virtual CPU – that is per virtual CPU configured in the virtual machine.

However, if you are looking to virtualize several machines onto a single physical server and licensing per processor, there is a calculation that can be used to work out the number of licenses, this will reduce the costs associated with the virtual environment.  If you are licensing on a Server/CAL basis (i.e. not Web Edition), the license is no different to licensing for physical hardware.

SQL Server Enterprise

One of the key benefits of SQL Server 2008 Enterprise is that virtualization is baked into the license agreement.  What this means is that if you license SQL 2008 Enterprise for your quad CPU server, you can run SQL 2008 on as many Virtual Machines on that quad CPU server as you can for no extra cost.