Licensing Virtual Machines in Windows Server 2019

Hey there. Thanks for clicking this video. Now, if you clicked, you're probably wondering all about those mischievous VMs. Don't worry. In this video I'm going to show you what you need to do and how you should license your Windows Server 2019 in a way that lets you legally and compliantly use Those sought after VMs in your environment. Let's take a look. The portability, security and versatility virtual machines provides us have made it a sought after technology in the corporate world. However, with such great potential power comes even greater legal responsibilities. These legal responsibilities can be left neglected as the virtual machine is in itself virtual and easy to forget about. And that's why we're going to take a look at the rules to license them. Oh, and one last thing before we jump into the licensing rules to put licensing your VMS in a visual perspective, we've created a PDF that outlines some of the most common server setups that are found in the wild. Click the link in the description below to check it out. For now, let's get back to the topic and talk about the golden rules you need to know when it comes to licensing your VMs. Rule number one a Windows server VM license is always tied to a certain piece of hardware. What this means is that all virtual machines are not actually licensed, but the cores they run on and the physical hardware they run on are and being so, they need to be fully compliant for you to legally operate them. Rule number two Physical and virtual instances can't be separated. You can't switch or mix your virtual instances across physical hardware. They have to stay with the same licensed physical device. If you want to move them, you need to buy more license to cover their destination hardware, upgrade to data center or risk non compliance fines. Rule number three is that you need to respect the minimums. The minimums are you need a minimum of eight core licenses per processor. What this means is that even if you have only a 1.4core processor on your server, you need to buy 8core based license packs to cover it. In Windows Server 2019 and the other minimum is for your server, you need a minimum of 16 core licenses to legally use VMs on server. What this means is that if your Server is running two quad core CPUs, even though you may think you only need eight, Microsoft's minimum states that you need at least the 16 pack to legally use that server for VM usage. I know it's highway robbery, but if you want to play in the VM VIP club at Microsoft, you need to abide by the Rules. Now that that's out of the way, let me show you how you can calculate how many license packs you need to buy, depending on how many VMs you want to run. Let's take a look at this little formula here. The first step you need to take is to determine the number of processor pairs on your host server. You can do this by adding all the CPU cores on your server and dividing it by two. We'll call this C. After that, you'll need to calculate how many VMs you would like to have or run and divide by two. We'll call that vm. Step three. Multiply those numbers together to get the amount of license packs you need to buy to compliantly run the number of VMs you inputted on your Windows Server Standard Edition. If you're running Data center, you can skip step two as you get unlimited VMs in that edition. Now let's take a look at how this all works out. For Standard Edition, it is c divided by two, rounded up, multiplied by the amount of VMs you want to run, divided by two. And round it up again. For Datacenter, it is just C divided by 2, rounded up multiplied by 1. As in Datacenter, you can run unlimited VMs. Now let me show you how this works in action. Scenario number one. You have just bought a new server for your Rack and have installed Windows Server 2019 standard edition on it. You are wondering how many licenses you need to buy to legally cover your two VM instances allowed from the purchase. The server has two 16 core CPUs. How many licenses do you need? Let's plug it into the formula. So in total, you have 32 cores divided by two multiplied by two VMs divided by two. That boils down to 16 times one, which in the end is just 16. So in conclusion, you'll need a total of 16. Two core packs to be compliant with this scenario. Now let's look at scenario two. You're setting up a fresh server and Want to run 6 VMs but only have standard edition 2019. Your server is running a 116 core CPU on it. How many license packs do you need to buy to run those 6 VMs? Let's plug it in. So you have 16 cores in total divided by 2 multiplied by 6 VMs divided by 2. Again, this boils down to 8 times 3, which in the end is 24. So you need to buy 242 core license packs to be compliantly running those 6 VMs on this server. So now that you've seen a few of the Live Action Examples Let me leave you with a couple of notes to keep in mind when licensing in the field. Don't forget that core licenses come in packs of two or packs of 16. Secondly, remember to make sure that you're always hitting your minimum licensing requirements. Thirdly, Windows Server vms or Hyper V containers are interchangeable, and if you're thinking about switching to Data center over Standard Edition, it's generally considered that if you're running more than 12 to 14 VMs, you should switch over to Datacenter Unlimited VM capabilities, as the cost to VM ratio is in your favor. As mentioned before, with great virtual computing power comes great legal responsibility. I hope this video helped you get a better handle on Microsoft Server's tricky VM licensing shenanigans. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment below and we'll do our best to answer. Thank you for watching. Don't forget to hit that like button and smash that. Subscribe too. And if you want to see some licensing setups, click the link in the description below. Remember, keep your software safe and your assets managed, and I'll see you next time.