IT Pro’s have been asking me about Windows Server 2012 Licensing and Pricing so I thought I would post about this -
Windows Server 2012 brings our experience with building and operating public clouds to the server platform for private clouds. The new licensing and packaging makes it easier to manage workloads in highly virtualized public and private cloud environments. Windows Server 2012 will move to a consistent licensing model and will have common features enabling the reduction of editions.
Get your evaluation trial version at http://aka.ms/msproducts
These include:
- Two editions, Standard and Datacenter.
- Single licenses that cover up to two physical processors
- Editions differentiated by virtualization rights only (two for Standard; unlimited for Datacenter).
Both Standard and Datacenter editions provide the same set of features; the only thing that differentiates the editions is the number of Virtual Machines (VMs). A Standard edition license will entitle you to run up to two VMs on up to two processors (subject to the VM use rights outlined in the Product Use Rights document).
A Datacenter edition license will entitle you to run an unlimited number of VMs on up to two processors.
All features that are available in the Datacenter edition are also available in the Standard edition, including high availability features like failover clustering. The only difference between the two editions will be virtualization rights.
