@scottalanmiller said in Need some help with SQL Server 2016 Standard licensing (price confusion): @jaredbusch said in Need some help with SQL Server 2016 Standard licensing (price confusion): @dave247 said in Need some help with SQL Server 2016 Standard licensing (price confusion): @jaredbusch said in Need some help with SQL Server 2016 Standard licensing (price confusion): @dave247 said in Need some help with SQL Server 2016 Standard licensing (price confusion): @jaredbusch said in Need some help with SQL Server 2016 Standard licensing (price confusion): @dave247 said in Need some help with SQL Server 2016 Standard licensing (price confusion): @phlipelder said in Need some help with SQL Server 2016 Standard licensing (price confusion): @dave247 said in Need some help with SQL Server 2016 Standard licensing (price confusion): Hi friends. I am working on building a new physical server to replace one which is running older versions of Windows and SQL server, plus it is almost out of storage space so this needs to be done sooner than later. This SQL server is running a 3rd party application and they currently only support up to SQL 2016, so that's what I have to install - not 2017. And it's going to be SQL 2016 Standard Edition running on Windows 2016 Server Standard with 16 cores. I spent a while researching SQL sever licensing to try and get an idea of how much it's going to cost. I haven't dealt with SQL server licensing yet. First, I assumed that I would still have to purchase SQL Server 2017 core licenses with downgrade rights. So looking on the SQL Sever Pricing page, it looks as though Standard - per core price is $3,717 (2 pack). So if my server has a total of 16 cores, this is going to cost about $29,736 to cover SQL licensing. Then I checked over on CDW just to get an idea of prices and things and I had the idea to search "SQL 2016" when I found this: SQL Server 2016 Standard - license - 16 cores - with Server 2016 Standard for like $1,900. Is this even applicable to what I'm doing or am I missing something? It does say in the technical details "BIOS locked (Lenovo)" but I have no idea what that refers to. But other than that, it looks like it's licensing SQL Server 2016 for 16 cores and bundled with Windows Server 2016. Surly this can't be correct... or is it? If it is actually what I would need to be covered, I would purchase it, of course. Otherwise, can someone help me get an idea of what I should be paying for SQL Server 2016 Standard Edition for 16 cores if not the cost I initially calculated ($29,736)? And I don't think we'd do the server + cal licensing as we have about 80 users and 100 or more systems which would connect to the SQL server. Simple rule of thumb to ask your Microsoft licensing rep for the following: First option is license + CALs that allows internal access only with unlimited instances on the server and unlimited cores: SQL Server Standard License SQL Server Standard User CALs (80 Users) Second option is per core with a minimum of 4 to purchase: SQL Server Standard Per Core 2-Pack (2x) In the Per Core scenario we can license for the number of physical cores to use and delimit that in SQL Studio Management. When it comes to audit, a snip of that setting that only allows the four threads should be just fine. So if you license + CAL, do you have to cover all users AND computers? If you license by user you cover users. If you license by device you cover devices. Well what constitutes as a device? I mean, users use a device to connect to the SQL server... so wouldn't I have to cover both? I don't get it. That is never how Microsoft CALs have worked. ok, I finally re-read the overview.. makes sense again. We have a pretty even user/device ratio with slight fluctuations in both over time. I suppose we'd just do user CALs.. There is almost no reason for anyone in the normal, day to day, business world to use device CALs. Agreed, this is super specific niche stuff normally reserved for manufacturing shift work. We have a few clients that run two or three shifts across one or more facilities. A shared device by two or three peeps per day is about the only time we've ever deployed Device CALs.

@dustinb3403 said in Verifying MS SQL Server 2017 Licensing: @jaredbusch said in Verifying MS SQL Server 2017 Licensing: @scottalanmiller said in Verifying MS SQL Server 2017 Licensing: @jaredbusch said in Verifying MS SQL Server 2017 Licensing: @scottalanmiller said in Verifying MS SQL Server 2017 Licensing: @jaredbusch one of the complications is that there IS no virtual core. vCPU is NOT core. a vCPU has vCores. Always. It might just be one. That is how it works. Not in any system I've seen. What people call vCores are actually vCPUs. The vCPU might tell the OS it has multiple cores, but the idea of a vCore has never existed, only vCPUs. Vmware, KVM, etc. all the same. Core means physical, it's like having a physical virtual, it cancels itself out. I am almost certain that VMWare lets you make a 1 CPU VM with 2 cores. Hyper-V just says virtual processors. KVM says CPUs. But I very clearly remember some hypervisor letting me specify a vCPU and vCores. XenServer and XCP-ng also allow this. 1cpu 2 core etc. Topology lets you state presented cores, not vCores. Totally different things.

I finally got this to work if anyone is interested. The sql file is fine, but I had to change my batch file. The correct one looks like this: "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\Client SDK\ODBC\110\Tools\Binn\sqlcmd" -I -S \.\pipe\MICROSOFT##WID\tsql\query -i C:\Scripts\WSUSDBMaintenance.sql It must be run from an Administrator command prompt. This took me several days to figure out so I hope it can benefit someone else. Everything I found about reindexing the WSUS database was on Server 2008 or 2012. This works on Server 2016.

@eddiejennings said in System center configuration manager and SQL server: For those who use SCCM, do you host the database on the same server as the SCCM application, or do you have SQL server as its own VM? I am replacing SCCM in our test environment, and will be doing the same eventually in our production environment. The current one has SQL server host locally. But since were looking to start over, I figured it would be worth weighing the pros and cons of keeping SQL Server local or having you be on the remote server. In my last job, we ran SCCM for a while and we had everything on one VM. (Small set up with ~200 PCs). It ran OK. I'd suggest keeping it to one host for your test environment, and separating them out for your production setup.

Do you have .net4 installed on this xp client?

I've only ever used Redgate, but have heard good things about ApexSQL.

General Info ESXi1 – Dell R710 – VMWare ESXi5.0.0 2x Intel Xeon E5607 (4 core, no Hyperthreading) 64GB RAM 1TB Local ESXi2 – R610 - VMWare ESXi5.0.0 2x Intel Xeon E5645 (6 core, 24 Threads) 64GB RAM NO Local ESXi4 – R620 - VMWare ESXi5.0.0 2x Intel Xeon E5-2640 (6 core, 24 Threads) 64GB RAM NO Local

@eddiejennings said in Who needs an MSDN subscription?: @bigbear said in Who needs an MSDN subscription?: @tim_g said in Who needs an MSDN subscription?: @eddiejennings said in Who needs an MSDN subscription?: This thread is inspired by the never-ending thread about licensing and replication in I Can't Even. I know that developers who use Visual Studio probably get their Visual Studio license through an MSDN subscription. One benefit of the subscription is that you're allowed to spin up Windows servers, SQL servers, etc., for development and testing. For organizations who have full-on lab environments or IT staff who need to spin up a VM Windows Server VM here and there to try something out, how do they stay in compliance? Do they also buy a MSDN subscription (perhaps MSDN platforms) for the IT staff member? Do they have their IT staff continually use Windows server 180-day evaluation licenses? Do they turn a blind eye as they give their IT staff activation keys from a dev's MSDN subscription and hope their organization is never audited? MSDN subscriptions are user-specific. To stay in compliance, every person who wants to take advantage of an MSDN benefit, will need to have their own MSDN subscription. They cannot be shared. Any VM spun up under the MSDN subscription cannot be used in any way by another person. Ah, didnt read the full OP post and assumed it was for him. However Bizspark MSDN does provide startup organizations with multiple user accounts all for internal use and testing. It is not for production or internal use. Yeah. It's not for me. I was just musing about the test VMs and such we need to spin up as IT, and I was curious how larger businesses or businesses with test labs license those test Windows VMs. I figured MSDN platforms wasn't used because of [see the above responses], but perhaps truth was going to be stranger than fiction. Larger is different. Once you are of any size you have enterprise agreements and your labs are just covered.

@scottalanmiller said in Appropriate Use of Hyper-V Checkpoints: @eddiejennings said in Appropriate Use of Hyper-V Checkpoints: @jaredbusch said in Appropriate Use of Hyper-V Checkpoints: @eddiejennings said in Appropriate Use of Hyper-V Checkpoints: With this upcoming project of virtualizing our production stuff, I've been thinking through the appropriate use of checkpoints. I'm sure there are other articles on this, but this seemed to be a good read. My grand idea is that checkpoints would be used before installing Windows updates or some upgrade to an application. You take the checkpoint, apply the update, and if everything breaks, you apply the checkpoint. If nothing breaks, then you delete the checkpoint. I'm curious how this would be handled with a SQL Server VM or Redis VM. You'd update your VM, transactions start happening, then things break causing you to have to apply the checkpoint. Any transactions that were done would be lost, which upon further thinking probably doesn't matter, since you probably couldn't trust any data put into the database while the stuff was in the process of breaking. You have to make sure you don’t have transactions coming in. Simple as that. Anything is a headache waiting to happen. Makes sense. When I do maintenance on these normally, I stop IIS once downtime’s been announced, then do my work. So I’d just take the checkpoints at that point. I imagine once stuffs back up and I confirm things aren’t broken, Hyper-V just handles merging the avhdx file in such a way that SQL Server, etc is none the wiser. Or is there significant risk of stuff breaking if it’s running while that merge process takes place? No real risk. Just performance loss. And never enought to matter to any SMB workload I have ever had to deal with.

@scottalanmiller said in SQL Server Backup Design: @jaredbusch said in SQL Server Backup Design: @tim_g said in SQL Server Backup Design: I'm with Jared on this one... Backing up through the application layer (SQL) as often as you can depending on change frequency. For example, every 15 minutes. Hourly and daily through the SQL backup tools. At least daily full VM backup at the hypervisor level. I prefer backups that use a standard file format, so you don't have to rely on Veeam for example to restore it. Veeam has screwed up too many times for me to want to rely on it like that. I have never had been fail Except for statements like this. For some reason Siri does not like Veeam yet. Even though correct it a lot

@oksana Still backups are needed

We have plans to add an in memory database to ML in the future when more performance is needed, as well.

@grey This might help get you started. There are 2 types of change tracking for MS SQL. Pick the one most appropriate for your scenario. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/track-changes/track-data-changes-sql-server

@JaredBusch Sweet!

at "200 character width" I started thinking about the COBOL class I took in college.

There seem to be 3 instances where links weren't put in correctly. 3/4 of the places you imply that there is a link actually have links.

@aaronstuder said in Changing SQL SPN: You missed blacking out some hostnames Damn VNC!

In this case, it was a matter of the settings during the restore. Under GENERAL you had to select your source and destination as normal. Destination was changed so that it was the new History file. Under FILES you updated the DB and LOG files to reflect the new DB, otherwise you would over write the originals. This is where they borked it. They didn't mention FILES only going to OPTIONS, and there is where they mentioned updating the file names. The main discovery was that you need to uncheck LEAVE Source database in the restoring state. When I emailed them about removing the 'borked' databases I had created the called me back. I mentioned it to the fellow and we had a short discussion on the matter where he took notes and agreed that the directions were incorrect. When I got to the part about unchecking LEAVE Source database in the restoring state he mentioned that he uncheck Take tail-log backup before restore Hope this helps.