Understand SQL Licensing and Compliance - How to Create an ELP and Optimize What you Buy​

Sam. Hey, good morning everybody. Or afternoon, I guess, depending on whereabouts you are in the world. I'm actually just going to wait a couple of minutes. We have a large sign up for this one, not only just through people that are going to be joining us here on teams, but we're also live streaming out to LinkedIn and YouTube. And so we're just going to give people just a couple of seconds to kind of get settled coming out of their, their previous meetings and I'll start up here in about two minutes. Okay. Okay. Welcome to Metrics Data 360's webinar. Understanding SQL license and compliance and how to create an ELP Optimize what you buy. As I just kind of mentioned here a couple seconds ago, this actually we, we had about four times our normal signup rate on this webinar than our other ones. And the reason for this is SQL is probably the most confusing licensing product that Microsoft has to license. And it's still a fairly substantial amount of people's overall spend with Microsoft. We average that SQL licensing, excluding Azure. So if you look at an enterprise agreement, SQL licensing still represents 20 plus percent of the overall annual spend in these contracts. So it is a big one and a lot of people are really concerned about it in terms of are we buying the right things, do we have enough licenses, Are we paying too much? And so we're going to have a good conversation today all about all of this for those of you that don't know me, because there's a lot of new people and like I said, we are streaming this live to, to LinkedIn where I believe there, you know, we had an audience of potentially 50 or 60 people joining us over LinkedIn as well. So I'm Mike Austin. I am an authority on Microsoft licensing. I worked at Microsoft in the licensing group for 10 plus years. I've negotiated well over $2 billion of contracts. And myself and my team here at metrics data360 we are really passionate about helping organizations drive cost out of their software contracts through all things around software asset management. Today we're really going to focus on talking about SQL Server and what's happening in that world. We're going to dive into, slide out of order here. So I'm just going to move this. We're going to dive into SQL Server licensing. Although we are wanting to talk about license positions and compliance and driving cost optimization, we're definitely going to get to that. But in order to do this we're going to have to set the foundation for that. Why is this topic so popular. Actually, if you look at our website, our SQL licensing blog is our number one traffic web content. If you look at our YouTube site, our SQL videos, our top traffic YouTube videos, like I said, it's a very common topic. The thing is, it's very confusing. Licensing model for SQL Server is confusing. In fact, our Data suggests that 70% of companies are either spending too much on SQL or have unknown compliance exposures. They're either spending more money than they should be or they've got a audit risk lurking that they have no clue about. And the top reasons for that. We're going to explore all of these in some detail today, but those boil down into kind of these six main things. So this is what we see across all the engagements where we're helping customers with this. The first being poor data quality, Right? And so I say here that typically the data quality is less than 65%. And so what I mean by that, we're going to dive into this a little bit later. But when we talk about data quality, you have to think about do I have inventory? So what devices are out there that have SQL installed and do I have inventory? And so from an inventory perspective, we want to see 95% of the devices that are out there having inventory. And then there's licensing attributes that you need to make a SQL licensing position, SQL Edition version cores, guest to host relationships, all this stuff. Those make up a number of attributes that you need to be making sure that you're pulling in your inventory reporting. When we start with companies on SQL Server, this data quality, I think giving 65% on SQL Server is probably high. It is really low. And a lot of people are making decisions on data that just isn't there. And it causes all kinds of problems that we'll talk about. The different license metrics cause a lot of confusion. We still have a lot of clients that have like Server Cal. They might have some old proc licenses still kicking around out there. Most people are licensing core based models, but you know, is it the same when I move to the cloud? How does BYOL work? You know, those sorts of things and it causes a lot of confusion. Hyper threading is a real problem in the cloud that a lot of people don't fully understand. The other thing is we still see a lot of organizations that don't understand what is licensable. And we're going to get into that because there are components of SQL Server that are licensable that are not just the database engine. There's a lot of misunderstanding of Testing dev environments, what I can and can't do, how best to manage those. Should I be licensing them? Shouldn't they be licensing them? We're going to get into that and then we're going to get into the difference between license optimization and cost optimization. Right. So these are the kind of topics that we're going to cover off today. Like I said, this is a confusing licensing topic. We've only got, you know, an hour to go through this today. So I am going to go fast through some of the licensing pieces today. If you do have questions, please, you know, either drop those in the chat or if you want, put your hand up and I'll pull you up and you can ask your question. I just, you know, please ask away. The more that you ask, the more that it's going to help you in whatever you're trying to accomplish in your, in your companies. So I think we're just going to start with how to license a SQL Server. Although we want to talk about license positions, we need to understand how SQL licensing works. Right? And there's a, there's part of everything. I always tell people when it comes to licensing, a lot of the times it has to start with understanding the definitions of what things are. Typically we're in it, we're in infrastructure, we're in procurement. We know what a processor is and we know what a core is. But the reality is sometimes a processor means one thing and a core means another thing. Then you get into virtual processors and virtual cores and things like that and it can become a very, very confusing topic. I always like to start with what is the definition of things. You got a physical server, we all know what that is. It's a piece of hardware that's capable of running an operating system that we install SQL Server on. We have a physical processor, that's the actual processor in the box and how many of those are there and then you have physical cores. But then you get into more complex concepts like virtual core. Some people call them virtual processors. Is a virtual processor the same as a virtual core? You have to understand what these things mean because in Microsoft definition of virtual core represents a hardware thread and they define a hardware thread as either a physical core or hyper thread in a physical processor. This is where this concept right here, this hardware thread concept. I've seen a number of organizations that are non compliant utilizing sophisticated deployment of software asset management tools because they're going out into their AWS environment, for instance, and calculating virtual cores incorrectly because of the hyper threading that's going on inside of the AWS environment, they're way under reporting what they need and it's the way that the SAM tool is actually doing the discovery. Right. And so again, we're not. These are. That's an advanced topic that we could talk for half an hour just on how that all works. But just know that just because I have a tool that says something and is reporting one way, it doesn't mean that it's right. That's where that data quality stuff that I was talking about comes back to. Do you have the right attributes? Are they reporting correctly, those sorts of things? Then you obviously have a physical operating system environment. Microsoft calls these OSes operating system environments. Those could be VMs, it could be a physical. It could be a physical deployment. It could be within a container as well nowadays. Right. So I don't have time today to go into the details of all of these, but you really should go into the product terms, the license product terms and understand how Microsoft defines these, because these drive how you count things. When we start looking at core based licenses or you know, old processor licenses or server and CAL license models, you have to understand these things. And so that's why when I talk about attributes earlier, Right. We said that when it comes to data quality, it's less than 65%. Right here in this chart represents a huge amount of that loss of data quality in that organizations don't have all of these attributes either reporting at all or reporting incorrectly. And then they're making license decisions on top. I'm trying to make license decisions on top of that. Okay. So if you look at licensing in the old, like this is the old model, you know, goes back 20 years. The server CAL model, it's still out there. I know this slide says 2016, but it could be 2021. Like it's SQL Server 2021 Cal model. It's still out there. Organizations still have it. Some are carrying software assurance on it, some still buy. Net new. Right. And the way that this worked is quite simply is there's a server license that I install on a server, either a virtual, sorry, a physical server or a virtual operating system environment. And that allows me to install SQL Server on that physical or virtual ose. And then I purchase client access licenses that allow my end users or devices to access that SQL Server. Okay. And so they have two different client access license types. There's user CALS and device CALS users go to the users device go to a device so that if I have a user cal, Mike Austin can access from my Laptop from my phone, from, I don't know, another PC in the office I can come in and access from any number of devices. Device licensing means that device is licensed to connect to the server. So in that case I could have multiple users go up to that device and connect. Right. So typical scenario here is knowledge workers usually have user based CALS. But if I'm a manufacturer with shop floor PCs or hospital with, you know, kiosks or PCs at nursing stations where you got four shifts or four people that go through and there's two PCs, they'd buy device because they could buy one device CAL and all 14 or 20 people could actually use that device. Now we're not going to get into a lot of detail on server cal because it is very limited. Now, probably less than 10% of the licenses out there are server CAL. The biggest complication with server calculator is a concept that Microsoft calls multiplexing. This is one of the reasons that most people get in trouble with server CAL is basically they look at it and go, I got this many users that access and therefore I need that many licenses. But they don't look at other systems that are potentially being fed by that SQL database that have other users hidden in between them. An example here is we had a client that's healthcare organization that when you go to check in, they print out, you know, those bracelets that have your patient ID and all that sort of stuff on it. And so they looked at that and said, okay, we have, you know, 10 check in areas so with 10 PCs. So we're going to buy a SQL server with 10 device cows because that's the most cost effective way to do this. Right? And so they went out and bought that. Well, that bracelet system, the ID system that prints the bracelet feeds their patient record management system, it feeds their X ray system like software. All the other pieces all get fed based on this thing here. And so it wasn't just 10 devices accessing, it was every device in the hospital basically accessing. And so when they got audited they didn't realize that they had a problem. Right. And so we had to come in and help them figure out how to get out of that mess. But that's what multiplexing is. That's why most people, if you're licensing with server cal and you can't license Enterprise edition, we'll get into that here in a second with server CAL model. But if you're licensing with that, I mean the auditors come in, the first thing they do, like we have seen audits where People have server CAL licenses, tens of thousands server cows. And the auditors don't even accept or even apply those licenses because this whole multiplexing concept and the technical technicality of trying to figure that stuff out in behind how these systems are interconnected, it was almost impossible. Right, so scrolling too fast here. Let me just go where I want to be. So the other model that is out there today is the licensing and the per core model. Right. So basically a per core model says that you count the number of physical cores if it's a physical instance or virtual cores assigned to the SQL oc and you license those with a four core minimum. Basically, if I have one processor with four cores, I buy four cores of SQL Server licensing and I don't need client access licenses anymore. It gives me unlimited people that can connect. The main thing to note here is it's four core minimum per processor virtual environment. You're just going to look at how many vcores are assigned to it, accounting for hyper threading. Right. And how Microsoft defines that in a physical environment. You're going to look at the number of processors and the number of cores per processor. Total those up as long as it meets the four core minimum. You're. You buy that many cores. If I have. I don't know if this even exists anymore, but let's say I have a two processor, two core box, that's a total of four cores. I would actually need eight because I need two by four, any four cores per processor minimum. Again, in theory, that's a relatively simple licensing solution. I just go look at physical implementations, number of processors, number of cores. I buy my SQL licenses in a virtual environment I work at, look at bcourse I talked about this virtual machine already. One of the things to know here is with VMs, with Cors, I'm going to look at the virtual Cors. If it's a server CAL model, I look at the server for the vm, add the server license to the VM and then I need the live client access licenses for the people that are using it now. Enterprise Edition of SQL Server. If I have legacy Enterprise Edition Server CAL like SQL Server in the Server CAL model, I can license four VMs with that one SQL Server Enterprise License. Again, very rare that people have these anymore because I cannot buy SQL Enterprise Server license in the server in cal. So if I put a new server on, brand new company went out and said I'm SQL Server Enterprise, I've only got 10 users, I don't want to pay 30,000 bucks per core or Whatever the heck it is. I was going to buy a server and 10 cows. I can't buy SQL Server Enterprise in the Server CAL model. It's only available for SQL Server standard. Now, server license mobility is a concept that we need to talk about because we need to understand this. If I think about a virtual environment, let's say I just have two hosts and I have one SQL Server on it, and those two hosts are clustered. Basically what that means is SQL Server could be on host one or Host two and it has the ability to move back and forth. That's the way VM works. Most hypervisors do that. In that case, what ends up happening is, let's say it's on host one and it's using four vcores. So I go and buy four cores of SQL Standard or SQL Server and it moves over to Host two. I don't have software assurance on it. I just have a license, only it moves over to host two. The license can go over to host two with it. But Microsoft has a 90 day rule, and the 90 day rule says that you can only transfer a license from host one to host two once every 90 days. So in a VMware environment where that VM might be firing back and forth all day long, I would be in violation of my license rights because I can only transfer it over once if I put software assurance on those cores. What Microsoft says is you can move it all day long. We don't care. The license can move with the vm, right? So most people are buying software assurance in their virtual environments. There are instances where you don't need it. If you have SQL Server locked down to a host, to a single host, you don't necessarily need it, right? So again, there's an attribute, right? So when I talk about attributes that we need to know if it's a virtual environment, I need to know if things are moving. I need to understand what the DRS rules are. Is VMotion occurring? What's the rules for that? If it's dedicated to a single host, Right. If it's in a cluster where there's like 10 host, can it move to all 10? Can only move to two. Right. Those are all the architectural things that I need to understand from an attribute perspective to make sure that I can actually license SQL Server correctly. Okay, so I think we've talked about the virtual course. I'm going to skip this slide. A lot of conversation comes into cloud, right? So a lot of the times what Microsoft has is they have server mobility from a software assurance perspective. So we talked about software assurance allowing you to do server mobility. They also have a concept called cloud mobility. Cloud mobility allows you to take your licenses and move them to a cloud provider, right? So that could be Azure, could be aws, it could be a third party cloud provider. Now, server mobility and cloud mobility are in the product terms, okay? There are limitations, right? So you have to look and see if Microsoft restricts that cloud mobility to certain providers. Now in SQL they don't, but with other products they say that you can use them in cloud providers. Except for aws, Google, Alibaba and a couple of others. You have to watch those product terms to even know whether I can move the product with SQL to allow you to take it over. This is the concept that people call bring your own licensing. Can I take my own licensing to the cloud? The answer there is yes. Now, the reason that we talk about private cloud on this slide is that if I license a host, all of the physical cores in a host with SQL Enterprise per core, I can have unlimited number of VMs on that host. Okay, so let's just take a simple example. I have a physical host that has two processors, four cores each, eight total cores. If I license eight cores of SQL Enterprise with software assurance, I can have unlimited VMs on that host. So I could put 12, 14, 20 SQL VMs on that host. Those could be standard, they could be enterprise editions, but I can put any number of them on there. Now a lot of people that we see, this is one of those areas where understanding licensing can either save you money or cost you money. Because there are scenarios where having SQL Enterprise at the host level makes economical sense. It's cheaper to license those eight cores than it is to license all the vcores. But the reality is, most of the time it's not. And I'll tell you where to watch for this. Kind of one of the tricks to see if you are doing this because a lot of organizations do this is they'll say, well, it's cheaper to buy SQL Enterprise, put them on the host and license for unlimited virtualization, right? Well, if all of those VMs are SQL standard, which is a fraction of the cost of SQL Enterprise, I might be more cost effective to actually license at the VCORE level. Now you have some trade offs there, right? Because some people come back and say, okay, that's great, but then I have a management challenge. Fair enough. I don't think it's that big if you have the right processes and tools in place. We'll talk about that later. But you Know it. There is a trade off there, right? So I have seen people where they're like, we license SQL Enterprise and you look at it and go, it's costing you seven figures plus to do this. And they're like, yeah, but it's easier for us to manage. I'm like seven figures plus to do this, right? You could just do a bunch of vcores and you could save a lot of money. Seven figures plus or even six figures plus sometimes. And I look at it well, even if you had to hire an FTE and challenges sometimes of getting that the ROI is there to do this, right? So you have to really be watching this though. Now one other thing to note with SQL Server Enterprise at the host level is if you have an essay, you get unlimited if you don't have sa. So if I just had SQL Enterprise, I'm going to say 20, 21 licenses, I can still license at the host, but the number of VMs that I can manage is equal to the number of core licenses. So if we go back to that scenario, if I have SQL server enterprise with SA and unlimited VMs, if I have L only, I can only have 8 VMs. Okay, so we talked about SQL Server mobility, right? So we talked about the ability that it overrides the 90 day rule. That's what that is. So I'm going to skip over that and then to shared servers, what this means, because again, I pulled this stuff out of licensing guides and stuff like that on purpose is shared servers are when you get into public hosting and you don't have dedicated infrastructure. So if I'm in Azure or AWS or Google and I'm just going into Amazon EC2 instances, not on dedicated hardware, that's a shared server. That's where you have to look and see what is the license mobility rights and am I allowed to do that? Microsoft's always changing this. So if you're watching this two years from now, it might not be the same rules as it is today. Today they allow you to take SQL Server over with SA to Amazon Windows servers, no Office licenses, lot of restrictions. It has to be dedicated hardware anyways. We won't go into the other products, but just make sure you go into the product terms and understand that. Okay, so next thing I want to talk about are some other licensing considerations because you'll hear things like active, passive and I have, can I just fail over, right? What do I get? So a lot of the times these rules, you have to be careful because you think that you can take advantage of them. But then when you look at what Microsoft states, you are probably potentially doing things that violate the ability to do these things for free. Right. So if you look at failover, for instance, Microsoft says I can have one passive failover for high availability. I can have one for disaster recovery, I can have one for disaster recovery on, in a VM on Azure. Right. But they kind of say it's, you know, passive is one that is not doing the following, you know, database consistently checks. So in other words, they're constantly talking to each other or consistently in this word, talking to each other. You're logging, you're doing log backups, you're doing full backups, you're monitoring resource usage. Right. So if you're doing those things, you can't get the free license for failover. Right. So you have to actually look at like when we say we're doing failover when it licensing. Okay, cool. Are you doing log backups? Because that's not free. Right. And when you get audited, the auditor just come and say, give us all your SQL servers. And then you kind of try and say, okay, well you put licenses on these ones that's. And their failover. And then the auditor is going to go, okay, now show me that you're not doing these four things. And when you show me you're not doing these four things, then I'll remove the licenses. So you're guilty until proven innocence in an audit with this stuff as well. Right. So you have to understand these sorts of things. Again, I'm not going through the licensing piece to go into depth today. I just want to show you the complexity of it. Right. Like why do people get in trouble with SQL licensing? Failover is a, is a great example. Again, there's some failover scenarios. I'm not going to go into that in depth. You also have the SQL Azure hybrid benefit. It's almost like a misnomer in some ways because I have server mobility so I can use my servers in Azure with sa. But they also have this Azure hybrid benefit which is similar. And this is where things get confusing. Similar, but has some differences. Now one of the main things is a lot of people think of hybrid benefits. They think of the Windows hybrid benefit where Windows, if I have SQL Data or Windows Data Center, I can license my on premise instance and I get some cores to use in Azure with SQL it's one or the other. I can't use it on both. Except for in a period I can't remember what the time is off the top of my head. It'll be in a future slide here. Let's just say it's 90 days from now, we'll crack it. If I'm wrong, I can have it on both on premise in the cloud for 90 days as we're doing the migration. It might be 180 days. I think it's a little longer than 90, but that's the difference. It allows me not to double license as I'm migrating. If I use the Azure Hybrid benefit, then it also allows me to do a couple of other things. Depending on if I'm buying what I'm buying, they give me a couple extra cores. So I have a chart on that here in a second. Right. So again, depending on what you're doing. So it is 180 days here, it is here. So I can have them on both for 180 days. And I only need in this scenario where it's saying I got 10 cores on premise and 10 in the cloud, we're doing our migration, I only need to license 10 at 180 days. I either need to be one or the other and if it's still both, I need to license for 10 cores. Now another great example is how the heck do you monitor if it's been there for 180 days? If I can do this, if I can't do this. So again, these are things where you get yourself into trouble because how do I keep track of that if I get audited? How do I know that you know, especially if like you got teams, engineering teams, whatever, just doing these things and you don't know all the details or have all the data and things like that. Right. So again it's sort of a benefit, but it's one of those ones that maybe you can't take advantage of it. Right. So I'm just going to go, I'm going to go back to SQL Server, Enterprise Server Cal for one last second here. If I have essay on it, I can continue to upgrade to the current version. So I think they got rid of that in 2012, maybe even longer to go maybe 2008. My memory is getting a little getting. This is getting a long time ago. I can continue to get the new versions. It only allows for 20 cores or less. So if I've got a 40 core server, that's SQL. SQL has to have the ability to see all 40 cores for this to be in violation. But the SQL Server Cal Enterprise license only allows you to have a server that has 20 cores and I can continue to renew it in my EA. So the 20 core thing. We do have a few clients that have this where they're like we have 40 cores and they're trying to assign these licenses and they can't. In the deployment data, this is where understanding attributes. In the deployment data, you'll see SQL Enterprise. I can't remember exactly what it is, but you'll see a different deployment title. And you can tell the one that because you can have SQL Enterprise, but you can have it. So it can only see 20 cores even if there's 40 on the server. So if you install it that way you can use the server calc license model. Again, just the little things that happen there. Now this is a big one. Licensing components of SQL Server. A lot of times people believe that they just license the SQL database, but there are actually seven things that you need to to license in SQL. You can see analysis servers, reporting services, integration services, the master data services, and the machine learning services. If I have any of those installed, it's licensable. Now if analysis server is on the same server as the database engine, no issues and people end up getting caught is where they take reporting services and put it on a separate OSE operating system environment from the database, might be on the same physical host, but they put it in a separate operating system environment and then that becomes licensable. They don't even know how to, how to account for this thing and go and find these things and that sort of stuff. And this is a big area that people get hit and audits all the time is these are licenseable components. The other challenge with them is even though a lot of these services can be used with SQL standard, they don't show if they're standard or enterprise. And so it just shows a SQL analysis server like reporting services or analysis services in the deployment data and they're going to automatically get assigned enterprise licenses. And so you really need to understand your topology to figure out whether those are enterprise or standard. That's again big difference. And the other big trick, the other area that people really get caught up here is active passive clusters, right? So if I have an active host and a passive host, if I have saved, I don't have to license the passive host. But then they go and put reporting services on the passive. And now all of a sudden it's licensable. So they're like, well, we got an active passive cluster. I'm not licensing the passive side. And then we go in and look and go, there you have reporting services over there. That's licensable, right? So again, one of those little things you got to watch out for. I'm not going to go into a lot of the detail on this. We've covered most of this, but it's a chart in here that goes through what are the actual benefits that you get from having software assurance. You know we talked about failover, that's your active passive in sort of older, older terminology. Right. You get the unlimited virtualization if you do it at the host level. Same with containers. So not just vms, but it also includes, also includes hosts. Right. So I'll just leave it at that. You get that license mobility within a server farm, license mobility in SA to other clouds and things like that. The other thing we talked about is the non production use. A lot of times people will say, well we have Visual Studio with MSDN or MSDN rights include SQL and non production, so we don't have to license it. That is true. If I have Visual Studio with msdn, I don't have to license SQL in a non production environment. The challenge a lot of the times becomes is that anybody that touches that non production environment needs to have a Visual Studio license. Now when it comes to an audit to make sure I'm compliant, not only am I auditing, is it dev and test and excluding it, I need to make sure that we know who has access to that environment and that they have the appropriate Visual Studio licenses for themselves. Now UAT testing, those sorts of things, you can have end users come in, you don't need to have licensing for that. So again, I'm not going to get into a lot of detail in this, but this is one where it's an opportunity to save a lot of money. Just need to make sure that you understand what it takes to do that. A lot of the times when we see SQL environments from a licensing perspective, some organizations are pretty good at keeping track of their dev and test servers. They might have naming conventions, but there's always exceptions to it. A lot of the times we know for instance in a SQL environment that typically about 60% of the of a SQL environment's non production, right? And so if we go in and we look at your environment and we see like 20% are non production, we're going to come back and ask questions because you should be able to not license 40, another 40% of those right? Now some organizations maybe only have 20%. They come and tell us that. But most of the time what we find is there's no naming convention, there's no standard way that they know it. And so Then we got to go and work with the database teams to figure out what's non production, make sure we have a way of tracking that moving forward. Right? So I went through licensing, right? We spent a lot, I spent most of this webinar, over half of it going through licensing, right? And, and the reason for that is you have to understand that to create a license position, right? But when it comes to creating a license position, these are really, if I boil it down into six simple steps, these are the six simple steps. Now they're not that simple, but these are the six simple steps. So the first thing that I need to do is I need to go and collect inventory data, right? And so a lot of the times people will be like, how do I do that? Typically, you know, you'll have some sort of network tool, System Center, Altira, ServiceNow, Discovery, you know, etc. Etc. That you can go and run an inventory report. Okay? Those inventory reports, especially with SQL Server, like I said, the data quality of what you need. So when we look at this, I'm going to go. Because the next thing is calculate your inventory coverage, right? And we want to be 90 to 95%, probably on server stuff, closer to 95 than 90. And I don't say 100 because you'll never get 100% because the environments are always moving, they're dynamic, they're not static. Right? But think about inventory coverage as I believe it's active on the network and I have inventory on it. And a Venn diagram, we have, it's active and we have inventory. We want 95%. If we're less than 95%, we need to go and figure out do we have, you know, what devices don't we have inventory on, why, how can we go get those? Or do we have inventory but we don't believe they're active, so should they be that be taken out? So you're going to go and look at the two outsides of that, those circles to figure out what's going on there, right? And we'll see all the time, like you might have organizations, not uncommon manufacturers, utility companies, hospitals, they have devices that they not allow. They're on networks that they're not monitoring or not managing with these sorts of tools for various reasons, right? So you have to figure out, okay, how do I then go and account for those? Is it a manual spreadsheet that I need to pull in together? Is there some other way? Okay, so you got to figure out how do we get that inventory completeness up to 95%. And when we work with organizations, this is one of the bigger areas that we end up spending time, particularly on SQL Server, is getting that inventory coverage up to a level that makes sense. And the next biggest, hardest part is actually making sure that you have all the licensing attributes that are needed. You want those to be 95% to 100%, right? So let me give you an example here where this comes in SQL Server, when you inventory it, a lot of the times will not tell you whether it's Express, standard, enterprise developer, and those range from free to 30,000 plus for a few cores, right? Big difference. And so if my inventory tool doesn't tell me that, how do I make licensing decisions? Right? That is a big question that a lot of organizations struggle with because they don't know. Engineer installed that thing ten years ago, six years ago. We have no visibility into it. We don't even have access to the server. How do I go out and figure these things out? Not to mention all the other attributes, processor cores, passive, active host, guests, relationships, all of those things. If I look at it and say, Okay, I have 100 SQL servers, do I have 95 of them inventoried? Right. Check mark one. If I need 20 attributes for 100 servers, that's 2000 attributes. Do I have, you know, 1900 of those? If I don't, I don't want to be making a license position. And this is where our competitors fall down. This is where most organizations fall down is they, they go ahead to go and get inventory where they're at less than 65% and their attributes at less than 50% and they're going to making license decisions, right? So one of the things that we do as a data quality report is a core deliverable that we give to our organizations. You could just go out and buy a data quality report for us where we'll go and calculate these two things to make sure you have what you need to make a license position for SQL. Okay? So the next thing that you need to do is assemble licenses. So what I mean by that, go and collect all our license reports to make sure we know exactly how many we own. Now I also have to understand things, I didn't get into it today, but we also have to understand things like if I have a server and cloud enrollment with Microsoft, I'm not going to get into all the details of that. Everything that I'm licensed, my entire environment for SQL Server needs to be licensed in that agreement. So if I have perpetual licenses, if I have licenses that I'm buying from Other agreements, I, I can't use those to calculate my license position. Microsoft says if you have an, everything needs to be licensed in there. So the next step is to go and assemble your licenses. Then the next thing that you need to do is determine the best cost license scenario for you. Okay. And that is where you need to understand how do I apply the licenses? If I have perpetual licenses, where does it make sense to do that? If I have server cal, where does it make sense to do that? When do I need that high value essay, where do I absolutely need those things? Right? So when we do a license position, then just in a chat, if I blow this, just let me know. But I think we calculate for each server, each host, each cluster, something like 10 or 15 different license assignments to make sure that you're getting the most cost effective way to actually license those. So we actually go and look at, go, okay, if you license at the host, if you license at the vm, if you license the old cluster, what's going on with mobility? We look at all these things and come back and say this is the most cost effective way to license it. And then we start applying your licenses that you have so that we're optimizing how you are utilizing those licenses. There's a lot that went into the algorithm that we developed. We have a tool, we call it synapse, where we calculate these license positions in minutes for organizations once we have these first four bullets nailed and run multiple scenarios. But it really takes a lot to figure out what that best opportunity is. That's where you get into license optimization. An area where a lot of organizations fall down in the cost of SQL. So we go back to that. It's expensive and 70% people are either overpaying or underpaying. We went through, in licensing a lot of why people are underpaying. One of the biggest reasons that people overpay, I blame it on SAM tools, quite honestly, like ServiceNow, Sam Pro, Snow, Flexera. Don't get me wrong, those are good tools, but they are what I refer to as set and forget. And so what I mean by that is when you get your deployment data, the first time you set these up, you get your deployment data and you assign your licenses in that tool. Now they don't have logic in any of them, to my knowledge, that figure out the best cost scenarios for that. They just, you go in, you assign your licenses and then they give you a checkbox that you're, you're licensed and you're compliant or you need that, you know, you're short, you need to go do a true up or whatever it is, right? But let's say you're compliant. So it's not telling you whether that's the best way to license it. And I've assigned those licenses to those servers, those physical inventory things. And then my environment changes tomorrow and I add some new servers and I go and run a reconciliation and it just comes back and says, oh, this changed, you need more licenses. It doesn't take everything, let them go say let's take a look at the new environment and reassign all your licenses in the most cost effective manner. It's just going to say all that stuff that you had still compliant, not necessarily optimized. So let's take an example. I put SQL Enterprise at a host. It's unlimited virtualization made sense when we did it. And then two years later we've migrated 80% of the VMs off of there to somewhere else. But we're still licensing that with 32 cores of SQL Enterprise. And now all we have on there are 16 cores, virtual cores of SQL Enterprise. The tool is going to tell me I'm compliant, but I'm over licensed by 2. X on that server. This happens all the time. It becomes how you get over license. Because I'm not looking at my licenses holistically, I'm assigning them to a device. So the SAM tools are a big part of this. The other part of it is the way that SQL gets procured. A lot of the times it gets procured as part of a project. So I'm putting in an application, I need SQL licenses, I buy those SQL licenses and then I'm off to the races and I just operate under that model that this was the best thing. And then three years from now we've re architected, done different things, but we're still operating under the model that we made the purchase from three years ago, which may or may not be the best way to be doing that licensing now. Okay, so here's that. That's what I mean by license optimization. License optimization, making sure I'm using my licenses most appropriately. I honestly believe that if you do this right, you can actually optimize weekly. Okay. Not doing on a true up, you can optimize weekly and make decisions based on data that are going to save you money. We're going to talk about a case study here in a couple seconds. Okay, the next piece of this is cost optimization. That's where you review your deployment data for technical optimization opportunities. Now when I say technical opportunities I am not talking tune my database for memory and storage and things like that. I'm looking at it going from a licensing perspective. You're doing this, but if you did this, you could save a lot of money. I don't know whether technically we could do that, right? So an example there would be if you actually created a dev cluster and put all your dev environment over here, you could then very easily license for dev and test because we can control who has access to that, use msdn, save you a ton of money. I don't know whether technically you're going to want to do that. You're going to have to strike, you know what I mean? You have to look at that from an engineering perspective, that sort of stuff. I want to show you guys how we do this, right? So this, we've taken an inventory report, so I'm not going to bore you with, with that. And we put it into our tool called synapse. We've taken the license position and then we run scenarios, right? And so you can see here, in this case, we are actually running this on a weekly basis for this client. Well, this one's monthly. So every month we do a snapshot to say, how you doing? Where do you sit? We run two scenarios. We run a cost optimize, excluding non prod, and we run a cost optimize without entitlements because we want to see how much that SQL Server licensing has value with them. We could run an SCE versus an EA scenario. We could run one where you're licensing production versus not production, all kinds of different scenarios, but we run this on a regular basis. What we can tell these guys this month is your true up is sitting at $161,541. Right? And the reason for that is you're short 62 SQL standard licenses. And they can look at that and go, yep, we, and, and in this case they told us, Yep, we've deployed 62 more core SQL standard. We know exactly where that is. It's good. Now, this client also had a spike at one point in time. We don't see it in here. They had $2 million of licenses showed up and we went back and said, Hey, $2 million of licenses showed up today. You guys are aware that you had a big project? Because we weren't aware of a project and we work with these guys every day. And they went, hold on, what's going on? Went and found that a team was actually doing a bunch of server upgrades and it was all good as they were Migrating some stuff to the cloud and it was going to be gone away. We're like, okay, how long? And they're like, it should be gone by the end of the month. So we watched make sure it was gone next month we went back. Half of it's gone. They're like, yeah, the rest of it's getting retired in 10 days. Right. So we're proactively monitoring that to make sure there's no problems. You can also see that we're looking here at like, you know, they have 5% physical and 95% virtual. You know, all that sort of stuff. Right now I also will go in and look at things like, okay, here are some servers. We've obviously anonymized this data. Here's a cluster with a host, with a device. It's got one component. It's got SQL integration servers, integration services on there. And that's literally eating up 16 licenses that are costing you $42,000. Can we move that SQL integration server somewhere else and free up 40, 16 standards? And you guys are short 62. We can get rid of a bunch of this if we can move this, right? So again, they'll go back to the team and say, hey, can we move this? What's going on here? Right? So again, you can look, look at all these integration services that are eating up licenses now. This is an architectural decision that they're making. And sometimes you can do that. Oh, you can't see the spreadsheet. That's interesting. Let me stop sharing and start sharing again. You should be able to see it. Ben, can you let me know if you can see that now? Okay, so you can see. Okay, so I'll just go back here just real quick because I'm not sure who could see that. I was just saying here's a summary where we can go and we can see we're running scenarios. We can tell them at any time it's 161,000. This is what their true up is. And I was going in and looking at like components only that were costing the money and showing like this. This is, by the way, a real. This is real data. This is not fake data. This is real data. You know that they have a server that's costing them $41,000 just because as integration services on there. So again, what we're trying to do here is go back to these people and say, like, you have a true up. Do you really, do you really need that? Even if you don't have a true up, can we optimize this? So that as you're doing some upgrades or moving some stuff to the cloud, we're freeing up those licenses. Right. You can also look at, we also look at some stats, right? So you know, they have an environment here where they have 40 deployed 11 or license pools eating up 34 enterprise cores. This thing is standing out to us for whatever reason. Let's go and see what's going on here. Like what is this demo environment? Because some questions in the Q and A table with teams meeting didn't realize there's a Q and A tab. Thanks, Ben. So, you know, so you can see here that. And I'll get to those questions here in a couple of seconds. So, Samina, just to answer your question on the SQL 2019 versus 22 licensing guide, you should always build the most current one. The sites that I was showing you, these things haven't really changed that much. So I just didn't pull out the 22 license guide using some slides that I've used before. They're basically the same concepts. As you say there, how do you license SQL Server standard enterprise on desktops and laptops? Ben, that's a great question because it is an area where people get caught. A lot of times SQL Servers installed on desktops and they don't realize it. And it's licensed the exact same way as you license it on a server. You think about if somebody's got a SQL Enterprise database on their laptop, you got to license that a minimum four cores and depending on what the processes are in the box, very expensive. How do you recommend designing virtual clusters to optimize SQL Server licenses? You want to actually get to the point where you have high density clusters. What you can see here is we're looking at, this is a report that we run where we're looking at clusters and how many of the VMs are SQL servers on there. The higher the density of your SQL servers, the more efficient you can become from a licensing perspective. Because we can look at that cluster and say, does it make sense to do enterprise at the host level or at the VM level? What makes the most sense? It's a good example of ways to look at things. A good example, I'm going to look at this cluster. 1.6% of the VMs are SQL. It's eating up 86 SQL Enterprise 2 core packs costing $224,000. So this is a good example of. Let's just assume these guys are licensed at the host level. Hey, can we move those VMs? Because it's only three VMs can we move those three VMs into this cluster and then we can free up $224,000 in licenses. Right. So this is how, once you start getting your data organized, you can start actually looking at how things work and where they go and things like that. Right. From a data quality perspective, what you'll see in here is this is a report that we provide that there's pieces of data missing in here that are needed in order to actually go out and get that attribute quality up into that 100% range that you're looking for. So you know what's missing. And in here, again, this is because it's anonymized, a little hard to tell, but we might be missing like the cluster or the host, we might be missing VCPUs, the production environment. So we give an exception list to our clients so that we can work with them to fill in those gaps. Then also starting to look at where things are located as well. Do you have things in cloud? Is it in Azure, is it in aws, is it in other, is it, can you do byol, what's going on? So again, you can sort of start to look at what is from a licensing perspective happening in the cloud environments versus inside your own data centers. Those, those sorts of things. Right. So again, all of this information is brought together and when I, when I talked, just let me know if the slides don't, don't show up again. But when I talked about cost optimization, is my cursor not going to where I need it to? Am having a problem. Oh, because it's already in presentation mode. So when I talk about optimization for technical or cost optimization, these things that we're talking about here are exactly what I was referring to is that these are the things that, you know, aren't, aren't licensing related, but are technical that could lead to license cost optimizations and savings. Right. So I wanted to talk a little bit about what this looks like. And so this is a client that we work with. We've been working with them for quite some time. They're Fortune 500 data companies. They have large SQL environment and it doesn't matter if this is large. If you're talking tens of millions of dollars of SQL or hundreds of thousands of dollars, the impact on everybody's budget is the same when you start doing these things. They had ServiceNow SAM PRO implemented for six plus years and when we started working with them, their data quality in their CMDB and in their SAM Pro licensing tables was less than 65%. Whenever they need to do their Microsoft true up, they would strike up a team of between four and six people and they would run a project for eight to 10 weeks to figure out what their true up was. And it was always mid mid seven figures. Okay? So they were always doing, you know, four, five, six, $7 million true ups every year they'd done that for four or five years. We went in and started working with them. Now, this was not overnight, right? This, this takes time, right? But we got their data quality up to 95% for both inventory and attributes. We started to look at how they were assigning licenses internally and we reset those. We connect to their servicenow, pull their inventory in once a week and look at their licensing every week. We reset it every week. So we're constantly finding opportunities to refine, right? We reduced their first true up when we started working with them by 60%. So for the first time, they had a low seven figure true up. Right. This year it was less than 500,000. And they were always budgeting seven figures because of the nature of their business. But as we continue to do license optimization and then we started looking at cost optimization, we continue to free up licenses. So as they were making changes in their environment, they're like, oh, we just added, you know, 100 enterprise cores. We're like, yeah, cool. But that cost optimization thing that we did last week freed up 100, right? So we're license optimizing, cost optimizing, using all this data. This year when they did their true up. So this is the second year we helped them. This year when they did their trip, they struck up a team of two people that had three meetings with us and it was done in two weeks. And for the first time ever, it was less than half a million dollars. The way they operated never changed. They know that if they continue doing the things they would have that the true up last year would have been 5 million. In the year before would have been 5 million, right? So they saved almost $10 million just working with us around this process and putting this in place. Okay, so if I go back to this slide here, we have basically three services that we offer around SQL Server that help with this. We do a data quality report. Do you have the things you need to actually make a licensed position? You know, I tell people all the time, there's so many people implementing ServiceNow SAM Pro, and they're like, it's going to do all these great things for us. I'm like, okay, cool. Your CMDB data quality, what's about 65%? You believe it. And most people say 60, 65%. Like you convert a CMDB into software tables and then you're going to apply licenses and that's just CMDB data quality. Do you know all the license attributes you need to make a license position just for a product like SQL? No, we don't. So you got bad data quality, making bad decisions and that's why you're either way overspending or underspending and you know, potentially have large compliance gaps that could be a problem. Right. So when you get this stuff into visible ways like that spreadsheet, when we sit down and talk through that, like we got it Director and CIOs and VPs that every quarter go through that with us and they're going back to their engineering teams going, there's $200,000 over here. What's it going to take for us to get it? If it's something that is going to take us $200,000 to do, or we can't do it because it's going to impact performance or whatever, we won't do it. But we want to know it, right? So we have a data quality report that we do. We do license and cost optimization. The end reports that you start to see are some of that spreadsheet that I was sharing. Right. So we can just do data quality report. Like if anybody's interested, do we have what we need? It's a pretty, you know, say, relatively quick process, four to six weeks to get it to, to get there, collect all the inventory, do that. Could be quicker, could be weak, depending on how, how well you have that, to see if you have what you need right up into the full license and cost optimization services. Okay. So I don't know if there's any other questions. That's all I wanted to, to put up there today. But we are offering that if you book a meeting coming out of this call today, if you end up wanting to do a data quality assessment or go into a SQL license or cost optimization engagement with us that we're offering 20% off based on attending attending this webinar today. So I'll stay on for a couple more seconds and see if there's any other questions. Just go to another one. I think I got all of them. If not everybody, have a great day. Haley's put a link in there that will go to one of our sales associates that can talk to you about these services if you're interested. Oh, sorry, two more questions. Are there in Q and A? Ben? Oh, I. Okay. I just had to scroll up. If a company's inventory tool keeps still data, how do you filter out decommissioned devices are not marked as decommissioning inventory tool. Again, those are processes that are, I would say somewhat manual. You're going to have to work through them. Maybe you can run some other inventory tool over top. There's a number of different, different strategies to go into trying to figure these things out. So it's going to depend, it's going to be, you know, client by client. Now the one thing that we do is because we, we keep this stuff all in a centralized kind of database. When we go out and find out that these things are decommissioned and there might still be an inventory, we can tag them in our system decommission so they do not get calculated in our reports. And the next time we run an inventory that tag is sticky and it still stays there. So I recommend you try and find something something like that. Whether no software Sam Pro Flexera, if you have one of those implemented, there are some ways that you can do that as well. I definitely recommend that. Then the next question was do you recommend companies use SQL Developer instead of Standard or enterprise for all non production? In theory it's definitely easier. SQL Developer provides all of the functionality of SQL Enterprise Server and it's basically while it is free in a non production environment. If you could install SQL Developer in all of your non production instances, it just makes it so much easier. You don't have to worry about the Visual Studio complexities of who has access. It's not licensable. Even if it's in a mixed cluster where you have production and non production, it's just so much easier. Now a lot of organizations don't want to do it because from an engineering perspective they want to make sure that everything exactly the same and that they can do that. But again, it's something that is worth discussing. It has a lot of implementations from architecture and engineering that you definitely want to want to be looking at. One last one, do you use Active Directory data to identify potentially decommissioned devices? Yes, there's a short answer. I mean one of the first things when we do data quality, we're pulling Active Directory and looking at what's active in Active Directory and what's in inventory and Active Directory. That ad or sorry, that ad thing scares a lot of people because most people will say their Active Directory is not clean. And it's definitely something that you want to be utilizing and leveraging. The auditors are going to do it. So you should be doing the same thing to understand it and then work towards cleaning up that data, similar to what we did in this case study. Same sort of thing. I mean, when we started working with our active directory data, it was a mess. And we just keep refining it a little bit over time. Right. It doesn't take a lot of time. Like, you think about that, in the first year of working with us, they reduced what they had budgeted and thought they needed for a true up from 5 million to just over a million dollars. Right. And so that's. That's substantial. Right. And again, like I said, it doesn't matter if you're, you know, if your true up budget's 200,000 and you reduce it to 30,000, that 170,000 you put back in that budget, you know, to you is equivalent of them putting back, you know, three, four million dollars. Right. So it's definitely worth doing. Okay, excellent. I think. I think I got them all. Thanks, everybody. Like I said, please, if you want to have a conversation, just understand a little bit more about what we're offering. Either click the link that Haley put in there or, you know, grab a screenshot of the QR code. I think that'll bring you up to the booking link. And we appreciate you joining us today. Thank you very much.