tharwood 94756 (7/2/2013)
Thanks. If SQL Standard is installed on a 32-core server, how exactly does SQL Standard limit itself to 16 cores ? I am wondering if there would be any performance or other issues in running two instances of Standard side by side considering they are doing something to limit themselves to a certain number of cores.
SQL Standard Edition will only ever use 16 cores per instance (and it does physically limit it), but you can run as many instances as you want, as long as you've licensed them.
You can set processor affinity for each instance to a different 16 cores each (e.g. 0-15 for Instance1 and 16-31 for Instance2), so they're not contending for the same CPU threads. AFAIK, there are no particular performance issues with doing this, assuming all your shared resources are not in contention (Disk, Network etc.).