Microsoft Licensing 3 – Clusters
In this post, I’ll discuss licensing when working in a clustered Microsoft environment. I’ll pick some of the more common Microsoft Apps and detail what is required to properly license them. Windows 2003 and 2008 support eight node clusters. In a two node cluster, you can technically have them configured in an active/active configuration. However, this is not considered best practice by Microsoft. They recommend running in an Active/Passive configuration. Three, four and five node configurations must have one passive node; the other nodes can be active. In the cluster, you can only have up to four active nodes, so nodes five through eight must be passive. All nodes must be licensed with either Windows Server Enterprise or Windows Server Datacenter. In most cases, Windows Server Enterprise makes the most financial sense. Enterprise has an MSRP of $4,000 per server up to eight physical processors versus $3,000 per physical processor using the Datacenter SKU. If there are more than 8 physical processors, you must use Datacenter.
Hyper-V cluster
The Datacenter SKU makes the most sense as the basis of your Hyper-V cluster in most Hyper-V environments. With the free unlimited guest OS licensing on each server, the breakeven point is 8 guest OS across the 2 node cluster. You receive the right to run 4 instances of Windows OS with each license of Enterprise. In a cluster, during a failover situation, more than 4 VMs might be running on the single node. Therefore, you would need to buy an additional 4 licenses of Standard. That would put Enterprise and datacenter, both at $12,000 for a 2 node cluster. Above 8 guests on the cluster, or when you are running copies of Enterprise on the guest VMs. If you have four physical processors, you would need to run roughly 20 guest VMs to break even.
This is a good point to add a quick discussion about virtualized environment hardware. Should you buy bigger 4 or 8 processor machines with multi-core or go wide in your cluster with dual processor boxes. When I’m designing clusters for a virtualized environment whether VMware Infrastructure or Hyper-V, I go wide first, and then scale up. My reasoning for this is simple, in both the VMware licensing model and Microsoft’s Datacenter licensing model; it is per socket costs. If you have 4 cluster nodes of dual processors or 2 cluster nodes of 4 processors. Both VMware and Microsoft will charge the same cost. Normally though the hardware costs to purchase two quad processor servers would be higher than four dual processor servers. You also gain the ability to have a higher utilization rate when going wide. In a two node cluster, you can only run at 50% capacity. But with a 4 node cluster, all four nodes can run at 75%. Another issue is that when running the larger hardware, a single physical server failure will shutdown basically 50% of your environment until they restart on the other node. When going wide, only about 25% of your environment will go down.
SQL Server
With SQL server, you would more than likely use the Windows 2003 Enterprise license. Unless you’re servers have more than eight processors, and if they do, you probably need this blog entry to explain licensing. Starting in SQL 2005, SQL enterprise is no longer a requirement for a SQL cluster. The Enterprise license now gives you additional features such as data warehousing. Microsoft is generous with SQL licensing in the cluster. You do not need to purchase a license for the passive node. License the active node with either per device or processor licenses and go. Again, in the same scenario as with Hyper-V, the licensing is the same whether you have two eight processor servers versus eight dual processors servers. Again, if you need more processing power on your database, you probably don’t need this blog. I should be talking to youJ.
Exchange
In a clustered environment of Exchange, you must run Exchange Server Enterprise per the Exchange Server 2007: Platforms, Editions and Versions web page. Also, you need one copy of Exchange for each node in the cluster. You do not get the benefit of not licensing passive nodes like you would on the SQL cluster. Exchange Enterprise licenses have an MSRP of $4,000 per server. As previously stated, and supported by Dell and IBM tests, Exchange does not scale well above 2 processors. So again take the cluster wide.
There are whitepapers by Dell and VMware that Exchange actually scales better in the Virtual environment than in physical. On a quad processor quad core IBM server, VMware was able to scale to 16,000 mailboxes. This was done with eight dual vCPU VMs each hosting 2,000 users. A blog discussing this can be found here. Dell wrote a similar paper on a dual quad core server.
My suggestions here; skip Microsoft clustering; get a couple of dual quad core processor servers and two licenses of VMware ESX 3.5. Load the servers up with as much ram as they will take and buy Exchange 2007 standard at $700 per VM. Build two Exchange servers using Standby Continuous Replication (SCR) between the two. Configure a Rule in the VMware cluster to put the two servers on different Physical ESX hosts. The VMware HA will protect you from a physical hardware failure; SCR will minimize the impact of an OS or application failure on the primary Exchange server. Of course you will still need additional servers for the other functionality in Exchange 2007: Edge transport, Client Access, Hub transport and Unified messaging. But with the cost savings of not buying additional servers, you can build standalone VMs to provide each piece of the Exchange environment.
SharePoint Server
With SharePoint Server, the best play would be to run a network load balance cluster for the SharePoint front ends and place databases on SQL cluster above. This will be a significantly cheaper solution as it will not required cluster able hardware and would only required Windows Server Standard instead of Windows Server Enterprise. It would also provide as high if not better uptime as a clustered front end.
SQL Server Pricing: http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2005/en/us/pricing.aspx
Exchange Server licensing: http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/howtobuy/default.mspx
Exchange licensing comparison: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb232170.aspx
Microsoft licensing 2
In a previous post, I spoke about licensing Window Server in a virtualized environment. Today, I’ll be addressing Client Access License or CAL, especially revolving around web facing. By web facing, I mean any server that services requests from any machine not owned by the firm. The underlying Windows OS license is not impacted whether it is web facing or private. Windows Standard is Windows Standard. To connect to a Windows server however, the machine in question needs to be accounted for with the purchase of a CAL. Purchasing a single license of Windows 2008 Standard gets you 5 shiny core CALs, Enterprise gets 25 CALs. In the datacenter licensing model, no CALS are extended’ but as seen in the previous post, found here, the savings more than make up for a few missing CALs. One gotcha in Windows CALs is that they are OS specific. If your firm purchased Windows 2003 CALs, you would need to upgrade to Windows 2008 CALs to connect to a 2008 server.
What do you get with the Core CAL? Here is a quote lifted from the Microsoft website discussing the Core CAL. “The Microsoft Core CAL Suite encompasses four fundamental Microsoft server products that provide your people with identity management, directory services, enterprise communication (e-mail, calendar functions, and scheduling), collaborative workspaces, and asset management. ” The interesting part of that quote is you now get an enterprise communication, previously known as an Exchange CAL. You also get a SharePoint CAL, and a Systems Center Configuration Manager Cal: Previously SMS. Pretty good, for a MSRP of approximately $40 a CAL, you get access to the standard functionality found in a Microsoft based IT environment: Active Directory, file and Print, Exchange, SharePoint and SCCM.
There is also an Enterprise CAL suite. The Enterprise CAL gets everything found in the Core CAL, plus Office communicator standard and enterprise, Rights Management and System Center Operations Manager (SCOM, previously known as MOM), Exchange 2007 Enterprise and Forefront Security. The extra functionality will cost you slightly around $125 per machine. Microsoft recommends that if you are going to roll out two or more of the systems found in the Enterprise CAL, it’s in your best interest financially to purchase enterprise CALs. You don’t have to specifically run one or the other either. If you only have 20 users running Office communicator or SCOM, buy 20 Enterprise CALs and buy the remaining CALs as Core. In larger numbers , however, this could become a burden on management as you have to ensure that you carry enough Enterprise CALs. You can also buy CALs specifically for each of the products in the Enterprise CAL. Again, this might become a management nightmare when dealing with large numbers of clients.
Now on to web facing servers: if you know that only users from your firm using devices that are properly accounted for in the CAL count. Then you have nothing to worry about. However, if anyone connects to a web facing server using anything other than a device with a CAL, you might need to an additional CAL type. I say might because Microsoft recently added a limited use External Connector to their Windows 2008 Web Server SKU. Microsoft now allows for up to 50 concurrent connections to their Web server product. Now this only affects web servers, if you have a terminal Server or file, file and print or need more than 50 concurrent connections to a web site. You would need to purchase an additional product. Bring on the Windows Server 2008 External connector License: Big name, easy functionality. If machines are connecting to a server other than a 2008 Web Server OS and they are not accounted for in your CAL count; you need an external connector. Luckily, Microsoft doesn’t stick it to us that bad, and they actually dropped the price from the 2003 version. The external connector license now costs $2000 MSRP.
Another area, where Microsoft gets a little extra money for web facing servers is through SQL licensing. Again, if you know exactly how many machines are connecting to a SQL server, you can buy that number of SQL CALs. You can purchase a Server plus 5 CAL suite of SQL Standard for $1849 with an additional CAL cost of $162 per client device. Now if you can’t guarantee that you know exactly how many users are going to connect through to your SQL server, such as in a public facing web server, you would need to license you SQL server by processor. This allows an unlimited number of connections, but it is significantly higher; $6,000 per processor. If you have a four processor SQL server, it would cost you $24,000. OK, you thinking but I only have one device connecting to it; the web server. Ah, good thought but Microsoft has already blocked that play. They believe that the web server is not the client; it is only the middle man in the delivery chain. You need to license the individual client machine; IE Joe public sitting at his Vista laptop sitting his living room watching the latest episode of Heroes on DVR. Ahem, sorry moving on.
So hopefully that gives you a basic understanding of Client Access licensing. A post on Cluster licensing will follow.
Microsoft Windows 2008 pricing: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/pricing.aspx
Microsoft Core CAL: https://www.microsoft.com/calsuites/core.mspx
Microsoft Enterprise CAL: http://www.microsoft.com/calsuites/enterprise.mspx
Microsoft SQL Licensing: http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2005/en/us/pricing.aspx
About mordtech
Experience:
I’m an IT professional with over ten years of Microsoft Server support. I’ve also supported Checkpoint and VMware. I’m currently employed by a large IT outsourcing corporation in the US.
I’ve implemented Windows Active Directory, Checkpoint VPN/Firewalls, VMware Infrastructure, Sharepoint/Project Server amongst others.
Personal:
I’m married and a father of two boys, which is by far the most trying job of my life: the boys, not the marriage. We reside in the midwest and aren’t looking forward to the fast approaching winter.
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