Trying to correctly understand core licensing in a vmware environment
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@scottalanmiller said in Trying to correctly understand core licensing in a vmware environment:
@dave247 said in Trying to correctly understand core licensing in a vmware environment:
@scottalanmiller said in Trying to correctly understand core licensing in a vmware environment:
Now to make things more complicated, if you didn't want cluster mobility, but only failover, you can move to SA licensing which isn't cheap, but is way cheaper than this. But if you wanted that, the three node cluster doesn't make sense. So based on the example, SA doesn't cover the goals.
So this is the first time I think I've heard of Software Assurance, and I've just looked it up and done a bit of reading. I understood the words that I read, but it's not really clear to me what exactly SA is or how it could help me in this situation... would you mind helping me understand?
SA is a "maintenance plan" for your Microsoft software products that are not SaaS (so MS office, Windows desktop, Windows Server, Exchange, SQL Server, etc.)
Basically, if you buy software the non-SA way, you pay for it and then... that's it. One time cost, and that's all you pay and.. that's all you get. It's very straightforward.
With SA, you get several benefits, but essentially there is one big one that is what SA is really about - you pay a small amount annually and you get upgrade rights. So, as long as you maintain your SA on a product, it changes it from...
Non-SA: "I bought Windows Server 2016!"
to
SA: "I bought Windows Server!"
You no longer care about the "version" that you buy, your SA means you have the right to use any recent version (so right now that's something like 2008 R2, 2012, 2012 R2, 2016, and 2019 in a few weeks.) You can deploy any of them that make sense today, and upgrade anytime that you want. No more "paying for the next version."
You get lots of silly extra like training and "support", but it's all minor. Sometimes certain features like maybe VDI are included with SA only, in those cases it can be a bigger deal.
In the Windows world, SA is often just considered a part of the license cost and most people ignore that there is even another way to buy Windows because it's the cheaper way to keep your Windows running healthy. Paying for each new version is more costly and more complex. But in the extreme small business arena, skipping SA is common and is often a major contributing factor to finding shops with extremely outdated systems because the pain of the full cost for the next upgrade was too much, but SA makes it a small, annual fee every year instead which is way easier to budget for.
So, does that mean if I installed 2008 R2 several years ago, with SA, I can move that server to a 2016 box for free? Otherwise I still don't understand.
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@dave247 said in Trying to correctly understand core licensing in a vmware environment:
@scottalanmiller said in Trying to correctly understand core licensing in a vmware environment:
@dave247 said in Trying to correctly understand core licensing in a vmware environment:
@scottalanmiller said in Trying to correctly understand core licensing in a vmware environment:
Now to make things more complicated, if you didn't want cluster mobility, but only failover, you can move to SA licensing which isn't cheap, but is way cheaper than this. But if you wanted that, the three node cluster doesn't make sense. So based on the example, SA doesn't cover the goals.
So this is the first time I think I've heard of Software Assurance, and I've just looked it up and done a bit of reading. I understood the words that I read, but it's not really clear to me what exactly SA is or how it could help me in this situation... would you mind helping me understand?
SA is a "maintenance plan" for your Microsoft software products that are not SaaS (so MS office, Windows desktop, Windows Server, Exchange, SQL Server, etc.)
Basically, if you buy software the non-SA way, you pay for it and then... that's it. One time cost, and that's all you pay and.. that's all you get. It's very straightforward.
With SA, you get several benefits, but essentially there is one big one that is what SA is really about - you pay a small amount annually and you get upgrade rights. So, as long as you maintain your SA on a product, it changes it from...
Non-SA: "I bought Windows Server 2016!"
to
SA: "I bought Windows Server!"
You no longer care about the "version" that you buy, your SA means you have the right to use any recent version (so right now that's something like 2008 R2, 2012, 2012 R2, 2016, and 2019 in a few weeks.) You can deploy any of them that make sense today, and upgrade anytime that you want. No more "paying for the next version."
You get lots of silly extra like training and "support", but it's all minor. Sometimes certain features like maybe VDI are included with SA only, in those cases it can be a bigger deal.
In the Windows world, SA is often just considered a part of the license cost and most people ignore that there is even another way to buy Windows because it's the cheaper way to keep your Windows running healthy. Paying for each new version is more costly and more complex. But in the extreme small business arena, skipping SA is common and is often a major contributing factor to finding shops with extremely outdated systems because the pain of the full cost for the next upgrade was too much, but SA makes it a small, annual fee every year instead which is way easier to budget for.
So, does that mean if I installed 2008 R2 several years ago, with SA, I can move that server to a 2016 box for free? Otherwise I still don't understand.
Yes. Where "free" = "already paid for SA". So no additional cost.
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@scottalanmiller said in Trying to correctly understand core licensing in a vmware environment:
@dave247 said in Trying to correctly understand core licensing in a vmware environment:
@scottalanmiller said in Trying to correctly understand core licensing in a vmware environment:
@dave247 said in Trying to correctly understand core licensing in a vmware environment:
@scottalanmiller said in Trying to correctly understand core licensing in a vmware environment:
Now to make things more complicated, if you didn't want cluster mobility, but only failover, you can move to SA licensing which isn't cheap, but is way cheaper than this. But if you wanted that, the three node cluster doesn't make sense. So based on the example, SA doesn't cover the goals.
So this is the first time I think I've heard of Software Assurance, and I've just looked it up and done a bit of reading. I understood the words that I read, but it's not really clear to me what exactly SA is or how it could help me in this situation... would you mind helping me understand?
SA is a "maintenance plan" for your Microsoft software products that are not SaaS (so MS office, Windows desktop, Windows Server, Exchange, SQL Server, etc.)
Basically, if you buy software the non-SA way, you pay for it and then... that's it. One time cost, and that's all you pay and.. that's all you get. It's very straightforward.
With SA, you get several benefits, but essentially there is one big one that is what SA is really about - you pay a small amount annually and you get upgrade rights. So, as long as you maintain your SA on a product, it changes it from...
Non-SA: "I bought Windows Server 2016!"
to
SA: "I bought Windows Server!"
You no longer care about the "version" that you buy, your SA means you have the right to use any recent version (so right now that's something like 2008 R2, 2012, 2012 R2, 2016, and 2019 in a few weeks.) You can deploy any of them that make sense today, and upgrade anytime that you want. No more "paying for the next version."
You get lots of silly extra like training and "support", but it's all minor. Sometimes certain features like maybe VDI are included with SA only, in those cases it can be a bigger deal.
In the Windows world, SA is often just considered a part of the license cost and most people ignore that there is even another way to buy Windows because it's the cheaper way to keep your Windows running healthy. Paying for each new version is more costly and more complex. But in the extreme small business arena, skipping SA is common and is often a major contributing factor to finding shops with extremely outdated systems because the pain of the full cost for the next upgrade was too much, but SA makes it a small, annual fee every year instead which is way easier to budget for.
So, does that mean if I installed 2008 R2 several years ago, with SA, I can move that server to a 2016 box for free? Otherwise I still don't understand.
Yes. Where "free" = "already paid for SA". So no additional cost.
but... doesn't that like circumvent the new core licensing??
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This is how I got the go ahead to look into Docker. We were looking at datacenter licences for our new IIS project. However, you can have unlimited windows containers on Windows Standard
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@dave247 said in Trying to correctly understand core licensing in a vmware environment:
@scottalanmiller said in Trying to correctly understand core licensing in a vmware environment:
@dave247 said in Trying to correctly understand core licensing in a vmware environment:
@scottalanmiller said in Trying to correctly understand core licensing in a vmware environment:
@dave247 said in Trying to correctly understand core licensing in a vmware environment:
@scottalanmiller said in Trying to correctly understand core licensing in a vmware environment:
Now to make things more complicated, if you didn't want cluster mobility, but only failover, you can move to SA licensing which isn't cheap, but is way cheaper than this. But if you wanted that, the three node cluster doesn't make sense. So based on the example, SA doesn't cover the goals.
So this is the first time I think I've heard of Software Assurance, and I've just looked it up and done a bit of reading. I understood the words that I read, but it's not really clear to me what exactly SA is or how it could help me in this situation... would you mind helping me understand?
SA is a "maintenance plan" for your Microsoft software products that are not SaaS (so MS office, Windows desktop, Windows Server, Exchange, SQL Server, etc.)
Basically, if you buy software the non-SA way, you pay for it and then... that's it. One time cost, and that's all you pay and.. that's all you get. It's very straightforward.
With SA, you get several benefits, but essentially there is one big one that is what SA is really about - you pay a small amount annually and you get upgrade rights. So, as long as you maintain your SA on a product, it changes it from...
Non-SA: "I bought Windows Server 2016!"
to
SA: "I bought Windows Server!"
You no longer care about the "version" that you buy, your SA means you have the right to use any recent version (so right now that's something like 2008 R2, 2012, 2012 R2, 2016, and 2019 in a few weeks.) You can deploy any of them that make sense today, and upgrade anytime that you want. No more "paying for the next version."
You get lots of silly extra like training and "support", but it's all minor. Sometimes certain features like maybe VDI are included with SA only, in those cases it can be a bigger deal.
In the Windows world, SA is often just considered a part of the license cost and most people ignore that there is even another way to buy Windows because it's the cheaper way to keep your Windows running healthy. Paying for each new version is more costly and more complex. But in the extreme small business arena, skipping SA is common and is often a major contributing factor to finding shops with extremely outdated systems because the pain of the full cost for the next upgrade was too much, but SA makes it a small, annual fee every year instead which is way easier to budget for.
So, does that mean if I installed 2008 R2 several years ago, with SA, I can move that server to a 2016 box for free? Otherwise I still don't understand.
Yes. Where "free" = "already paid for SA". So no additional cost.
but... doesn't that like circumvent the new core licensing??
No. It converted to 16 cores. This is also assuming that you have maintained SA this whole time. It is a yearly cost.
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@dave247 said in Trying to correctly understand core licensing in a vmware environment:
@scottalanmiller said in Trying to correctly understand core licensing in a vmware environment:
@dave247 said in Trying to correctly understand core licensing in a vmware environment:
@scottalanmiller said in Trying to correctly understand core licensing in a vmware environment:
@dave247 said in Trying to correctly understand core licensing in a vmware environment:
@scottalanmiller said in Trying to correctly understand core licensing in a vmware environment:
Now to make things more complicated, if you didn't want cluster mobility, but only failover, you can move to SA licensing which isn't cheap, but is way cheaper than this. But if you wanted that, the three node cluster doesn't make sense. So based on the example, SA doesn't cover the goals.
So this is the first time I think I've heard of Software Assurance, and I've just looked it up and done a bit of reading. I understood the words that I read, but it's not really clear to me what exactly SA is or how it could help me in this situation... would you mind helping me understand?
SA is a "maintenance plan" for your Microsoft software products that are not SaaS (so MS office, Windows desktop, Windows Server, Exchange, SQL Server, etc.)
Basically, if you buy software the non-SA way, you pay for it and then... that's it. One time cost, and that's all you pay and.. that's all you get. It's very straightforward.
With SA, you get several benefits, but essentially there is one big one that is what SA is really about - you pay a small amount annually and you get upgrade rights. So, as long as you maintain your SA on a product, it changes it from...
Non-SA: "I bought Windows Server 2016!"
to
SA: "I bought Windows Server!"
You no longer care about the "version" that you buy, your SA means you have the right to use any recent version (so right now that's something like 2008 R2, 2012, 2012 R2, 2016, and 2019 in a few weeks.) You can deploy any of them that make sense today, and upgrade anytime that you want. No more "paying for the next version."
You get lots of silly extra like training and "support", but it's all minor. Sometimes certain features like maybe VDI are included with SA only, in those cases it can be a bigger deal.
In the Windows world, SA is often just considered a part of the license cost and most people ignore that there is even another way to buy Windows because it's the cheaper way to keep your Windows running healthy. Paying for each new version is more costly and more complex. But in the extreme small business arena, skipping SA is common and is often a major contributing factor to finding shops with extremely outdated systems because the pain of the full cost for the next upgrade was too much, but SA makes it a small, annual fee every year instead which is way easier to budget for.
So, does that mean if I installed 2008 R2 several years ago, with SA, I can move that server to a 2016 box for free? Otherwise I still don't understand.
Yes. Where "free" = "already paid for SA". So no additional cost.
but... doesn't that like circumvent the new core licensing??
No, you keep moving forward. You still need to license correctly, but you don't have to rebuy what you already have.
2012 R2 standard base is 2 CPUs, which is now 16 cores.
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@flaxking said in Trying to correctly understand core licensing in a vmware environment:
This is how I got the go ahead to look into Docker. We were looking at datacenter licences for our new IIS project. However, you can have unlimited windows containers on Windows Standard
That's because there isn't another OS, it's just an app encapsulated.
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@flaxking said in Trying to correctly understand core licensing in a vmware environment:
This is how I got the go ahead to look into Docker. We were looking at datacenter licences for our new IIS project. However, you can have unlimited windows containers on Windows Standard
oh my god another product...
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Thanks everyone. This all makes sense now and the main question of my post has been answered.
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@dave247 said in Trying to correctly understand core licensing in a vmware environment:
@obsolesce said in Trying to correctly understand core licensing in a vmware environment:
@scottalanmiller said in Trying to correctly understand core licensing in a vmware environment:
Moving to Hyper-V or KVM would save some, but most of it is Windows
Isn't the bare minimum VMWare cost like $1300 per Cpu socket?
That's still $8k or so. And that doesn't get you anything more than Hyper-V except $8k of support you won't use.
What are you talking about? I already have VMware set up and running so there is no VMware cost associated with the Windows 2016 licensing situation.
I was talking about the cost of VMWare's pricing per CPU, in addition to, but separate from the Windows licensing.
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@obsolesce said in Trying to correctly understand core licensing in a vmware environment:
@dave247 said in Trying to correctly understand core licensing in a vmware environment:
@obsolesce said in Trying to correctly understand core licensing in a vmware environment:
@scottalanmiller said in Trying to correctly understand core licensing in a vmware environment:
Moving to Hyper-V or KVM would save some, but most of it is Windows
Isn't the bare minimum VMWare cost like $1300 per Cpu socket?
That's still $8k or so. And that doesn't get you anything more than Hyper-V except $8k of support you won't use.
What are you talking about? I already have VMware set up and running so there is no VMware cost associated with the Windows 2016 licensing situation.
I was talking about the cost of VMWare's pricing per CPU, in addition to, but separate from the Windows licensing.
Right but we already have purchased VMware in the example and I was only asking about MS core licensing. Or are you saying there is some additional cost with VMware at the time of licensing and deploying a new 2016 server?
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@scottalanmiller said in Trying to correctly understand core licensing in a vmware environment:
Look at the example here, three tiny hosts (I know it's just a theoretical learning example, but it's how people do it) with six CPUs where three would be cheaper and have better performance, and three hosts where two would be cheaper and have better performance.
Look at the cluster size, it's a total of 36 cores. You can do that better and cheaper using two, single socket servers with 18 cores each! If you needed a little extra during a failover, go for two at 20 cores each or whatever.
I'm not that knowledgeable with hardware, including processors and things.. but are you saying that single socket with x number of cores is better/faster than multiple sockets with x number of cores?
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@dave247 said in Trying to correctly understand core licensing in a vmware environment:
@obsolesce said in Trying to correctly understand core licensing in a vmware environment:
So we're at like $35,000 of software licensing at this point... For what? What's the end goal here that justifies the costs? Oh, that's not even considering CALs. That could be many more thousands. And this is every few years without SA.
I'm not sure how you came up with $35,000 here... I calculated that it would be around roughly $3K for core licenses across those three hosts (per every 2 instances of Server 2016).
That $35,000 is a rounded up figure of you'd get Windows Server Licensing with SA for 9 VMs, plus the cost of VMWare, which you already have. I was figuring between $4-$5k per 2 VMs. Cheaper without SA, then it's about $3k per 2 VMs.
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@obsolesce said in Trying to correctly understand core licensing in a vmware environment:
@dave247 said in Trying to correctly understand core licensing in a vmware environment:
@obsolesce said in Trying to correctly understand core licensing in a vmware environment:
So we're at like $35,000 of software licensing at this point... For what? What's the end goal here that justifies the costs? Oh, that's not even considering CALs. That could be many more thousands. And this is every few years without SA.
I'm not sure how you came up with $35,000 here... I calculated that it would be around roughly $3K for core licenses across those three hosts (per every 2 instances of Server 2016).
That $35,000 is a rounded up figure of you'd get Windows Server Licensing with SA for 9 VMs, plus the cost of VMWare, which you already have. I was figuring between $4-$5k per 2 VMs. Cheaper without SA, then it's about $3k per 2 VMs.
We purchased vSphere Essentials Plus 6 back in 2016 for like $5k, which allows for vCenter and up to 6 CPUs. I don't really know anything about licensing per vm with that... I will have to look into it again.vv
EDIT:
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@dave247 said in Trying to correctly understand core licensing in a vmware environment:
@scottalanmiller said in Trying to correctly understand core licensing in a vmware environment:
Look at the example here, three tiny hosts (I know it's just a theoretical learning example, but it's how people do it) with six CPUs where three would be cheaper and have better performance, and three hosts where two would be cheaper and have better performance.
Look at the cluster size, it's a total of 36 cores. You can do that better and cheaper using two, single socket servers with 18 cores each! If you needed a little extra during a failover, go for two at 20 cores each or whatever.
I'm not that knowledgeable with hardware, including processors and things.. but are you saying that single socket with x number of cores is better/faster than multiple sockets with x number of cores?
All other factors being equal, yes. The same power with fewer cores, fewer sockets, fewer procs is ideal. It's not very often you can get it apples to apples, but you can get pretty close with processors and cores in this range today.
A single 16 core X processor at Y speed is faster than two 8 core X processors at Y speed for nearly all things. This is because it gets all of its memory from a single source and doesn't need to pass as many workloads back and forth between processors. There is overhead to that that you can avoid.
And a single processor of double the cores is generally quite a bit cheaper than two of half as many cores.
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@scottalanmiller said in Trying to correctly understand core licensing in a vmware environment:
@dave247 said in Trying to correctly understand core licensing in a vmware environment:
@scottalanmiller said in Trying to correctly understand core licensing in a vmware environment:
Look at the example here, three tiny hosts (I know it's just a theoretical learning example, but it's how people do it) with six CPUs where three would be cheaper and have better performance, and three hosts where two would be cheaper and have better performance.
Look at the cluster size, it's a total of 36 cores. You can do that better and cheaper using two, single socket servers with 18 cores each! If you needed a little extra during a failover, go for two at 20 cores each or whatever.
I'm not that knowledgeable with hardware, including processors and things.. but are you saying that single socket with x number of cores is better/faster than multiple sockets with x number of cores?
All other factors being equal, yes. The same power with fewer cores, fewer sockets, fewer procs is ideal. It's not very often you can get it apples to apples, but you can get pretty close with processors and cores in this range today.
A single 16 core X processor at Y speed is faster than two 8 core X processors at Y speed for nearly all things. This is because it gets all of its memory from a single source and doesn't need to pass as many workloads back and forth between processors. There is overhead to that that you can avoid.
And a single processor of double the cores is generally quite a bit cheaper than two of half as many cores.
ok, this is pretty much what I was assuming.
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@scottalanmiller said in Trying to correctly understand core licensing in a vmware environment:
@flaxking said in Trying to correctly understand core licensing in a vmware environment:
This is how I got the go ahead to look into Docker. We were looking at datacenter licences for our new IIS project. However, you can have unlimited windows containers on Windows Standard
That's because there isn't another OS, it's just an app encapsulated.
And the benefit to us is that the OS is now no longer the smallest unit of isolation. The original plan has a ton of VMs so that parts of the stack could be updated without affecting other parts, and without any downtime. Basically they were trying to design a modern app stack, but trying to avoid learning new technology, and Windows licencing costs saved the day.
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@obsolesce said in Trying to correctly understand core licensing in a vmware environment:
Isn't the bare minimum VMWare cost like $1300 per Cpu socket?
ESXi is free. If you want to run central management it's ~$600 for essentials (Roughly $100 per socket for 3 hosts) or $6000 for essentials plus (Around $1000 per socket, but includes a vCenter license).
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@dave247 said in Trying to correctly understand core licensing in a vmware environment:
@obsolesce said in Trying to correctly understand core licensing in a vmware environment:
@dave247 said in Trying to correctly understand core licensing in a vmware environment:
@obsolesce said in Trying to correctly understand core licensing in a vmware environment:
So we're at like $35,000 of software licensing at this point... For what? What's the end goal here that justifies the costs? Oh, that's not even considering CALs. That could be many more thousands. And this is every few years without SA.
I'm not sure how you came up with $35,000 here... I calculated that it would be around roughly $3K for core licenses across those three hosts (per every 2 instances of Server 2016).
That $35,000 is a rounded up figure of you'd get Windows Server Licensing with SA for 9 VMs, plus the cost of VMWare, which you already have. I was figuring between $4-$5k per 2 VMs. Cheaper without SA, then it's about $3k per 2 VMs.
We purchased vSphere Essentials Plus 6 back in 2016 for like $5k, which allows for vCenter and up to 6 CPUs. I don't really know anything about licensing per vm with that... I will have to look into it again.vv
EDIT:
You have unlimited VM's across 3 hosts with up to 2 sockets. Note, you can upgrade this to newer versions until the end of time if you pay the support renewal (~1000 per year)
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@scottalanmiller said in Trying to correctly understand core licensing in a vmware environment:
@dave247 said in Trying to correctly understand core licensing in a vmware environment:
@scottalanmiller said in Trying to correctly understand core licensing in a vmware environment:
@dave247 said in Trying to correctly understand core licensing in a vmware environment:
@scottalanmiller said in Trying to correctly understand core licensing in a vmware environment:
Now to make things more complicated, if you didn't want cluster mobility, but only failover, you can move to SA licensing which isn't cheap, but is way cheaper than this. But if you wanted that, the three node cluster doesn't make sense. So based on the example, SA doesn't cover the goals.
So this is the first time I think I've heard of Software Assurance, and I've just looked it up and done a bit of reading. I understood the words that I read, but it's not really clear to me what exactly SA is or how it could help me in this situation... would you mind helping me understand?
SA is a "maintenance plan" for your Microsoft software products that are not SaaS (so MS office, Windows desktop, Windows Server, Exchange, SQL Server, etc.)
Basically, if you buy software the non-SA way, you pay for it and then... that's it. One time cost, and that's all you pay and.. that's all you get. It's very straightforward.
With SA, you get several benefits, but essentially there is one big one that is what SA is really about - you pay a small amount annually and you get upgrade rights. So, as long as you maintain your SA on a product, it changes it from...
Non-SA: "I bought Windows Server 2016!"
to
SA: "I bought Windows Server!"
You no longer care about the "version" that you buy, your SA means you have the right to use any recent version (so right now that's something like 2008 R2, 2012, 2012 R2, 2016, and 2019 in a few weeks.) You can deploy any of them that make sense today, and upgrade anytime that you want. No more "paying for the next version."
You get lots of silly extra like training and "support", but it's all minor. Sometimes certain features like maybe VDI are included with SA only, in those cases it can be a bigger deal.
In the Windows world, SA is often just considered a part of the license cost and most people ignore that there is even another way to buy Windows because it's the cheaper way to keep your Windows running healthy. Paying for each new version is more costly and more complex. But in the extreme small business arena, skipping SA is common and is often a major contributing factor to finding shops with extremely outdated systems because the pain of the full cost for the next upgrade was too much, but SA makes it a small, annual fee every year instead which is way easier to budget for.
So, does that mean if I installed 2008 R2 several years ago, with SA, I can move that server to a 2016 box for free? Otherwise I still don't understand.
Yes. Where "free" = "already paid for SA". So no additional cost.
Note, SA is a subscription. SA is normally sold for 3 year terms, so at this point you would have paid for possibly 2 renewals. Given the price of the SA renewals it would have been cheaper to just not have bought SA and bought 2016 on the new box.
