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Licencing Question with 2 instances and active/pasive

  • December 20, 2018 at 3:52 am

    #416572

    Hi

    We are after using 2 instances with an availability group in each instance over 2 servers, but want to save on licence costs by using active passive - is this possible? (and acceptable to MS licencing!) - as each instance could fail separately so end up on different nodes - is there a way to ensure they remain together so only 1 server will ever be active for both instances and the other passive for both

    Thanks

  • December 20, 2018 at 3:57 am

    #2016925

    Adam.K - Thursday, December 20, 2018 3:52 AM

    Hi

    We are after using 2 instances with an availability group in each instance over 2 servers, but want to save on licence costs by using active passive - is this possible? (and acceptable to MS licencing!) - as each instance could fail separately so end up on different nodes - is there a way to ensure they remain together so only 1 server will ever be active for both instances and the other passive for both

    Thanks

    IIRC only one licence is needed in active/passive if the passive node is not accessible.
    😎

  • December 20, 2018 at 5:18 am

    #2016933

    You'll incur the wrath of Allan Hirt!

    https://sqlha.com/2012/01/09/once-more-with-feeling-stop-using-activepassive-and-activeactive/

    😉

    qh

    [font="Tahoma"]Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes. – Carl Jung.[/font]

  • December 20, 2018 at 8:07 am

    #2016950

    ahh!!! - i re phrase.... wouldn't want to get into trouble

    its a multi node multi instance setup (dont think ill get in trouble for that)
    so we have instance-1 and instance-2 running on node-1, with non readable availability group copies of both instances on node-2 .... node-1 is licenced and node-2 is not
    on a failover we want both instances to fail at the same time to node-2, leaving the non readable copies on node-1 so still only needing to licence 1 node

    however as each instance is independent there is a chance instance-1 remains on node-1 and instance-2 fails over to node-2, so both servers would need to be licenced.

    is there an acceptable (to ms licencing people) that ties them together allowing us to only licence 1 node? - we could put in an agent job to test / move as needed, but there would still be times where both servers are active (will i get away with that word here...)

    thanks

  • December 20, 2018 at 11:19 am

    #2016978

    It is best to make sure that you are in compliance by speaking directly to Microsoft.

    From your description, your primary node(s) needs to be licensed for all cores, and it needs SA.  Your secondary needs to be licensed for all cores with SA only.  
    Your secondary, assuming you have an enterprise agreement, will only need to have all cores licensed regardless of how many instances are installed.  

    If your secondaries are read-only, they will also need to be licensed in the same manner as the primary.

    Michael L John
    If you assassinate a DBA, would you pull a trigger?
    To properly post on a forum:
    http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/61537/

  • December 21, 2018 at 1:46 pm

    #2017130

    In terms of failover, you'd need to write scripting to ensure that an instance fails over if it detects the other instance has failed.

    However, I'm not sure that this is compliant with MS licensing. You'd have to ask them.

  • December 21, 2018 at 3:05 pm

    #2017140

    I am not a licensing expert, but I believe Software Assurance may be required in the Active/Passive scenario.

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