I once had a sales leader say to me “where there is change, there is opportunity.” What we”ve found regarding SQL 2012 is there is a lot of confusion around virtualization, how this will affect the datacenter environment, and ultimately how will this affect costs. At the same time, it might mean opportunity!

I wrote in a previous blog post about SQL 2012 in a general sense, and today I would like to review my two reasons on why switching to SQL Enterprise 2012 may be a good move.

1. SQL Enterprise  2012 allows unlimited virtualization
2. SQL Enterprise 2012 allows license mobility

Those two things alone “might” be a reason to switch. With unlimited virtualization, you can license every physical core (minimum 4 cores per processor) on the host machine that allow you to spin up as many virtual instances of SQL on that host machine. This is a good move considering the cost of SQL Datacenter 2008R2 was outrageous. The issue now is SQL 2012 is licensed by the core not by the physical processor. For those service providers that built very robust servers with multiple cores this may be a price increase. (Thus, the “might” part in my explanation above in reasons to switch.)

So now that you have unlimited virtualization, what happens if those virtual instances (VM’s) can move from host to host or even across data centers?Theoretically you would need to license those physical hosts right?

To quote ESPN’s Lee Corso… “Not so fast my friend.” [Read more...]