March 16, 2021 at 3:05 pm
Good morning all ,
How is the cost of the SQL CAL license calculated (Per number of Users)
this is the SQL 2019 Standard Edition
and according to you which is the cheapest CAL or Core license
Thank you for your feedback
March 16, 2021 at 5:04 pm
My advice - ask your license provider about that.
CAL vs Core really depends on your scenario and setup and the deals your licensing provider can get you.
Plus, in the event the advice you get here is different than your license provider gives, who are you going to trust?
With us, it made more sense to get the Core license than CAL license as we have multiple SQL instances (60-ish) on a multiple boxes (5) with a few hundred people connecting to them per day.
If memory serves, you need 1 CAL per user per instance for each user who can connect to the instance. So if you set it up so "domain users" can connect, you would need a license for all domain users, even if only 1% of those domain users actually connected to the instance. And once you start spinning up more instances, you would need more CALs. <-- NOTE I may be mistaken on needing 1 CAL per user per instance; it may be 1 CAL per user per machine.
BUT your license provider will be able to walk you through what is best in your scenario. Plus they can provide you a quote for CAL and Core licensing.
Something to note - if your developers have a Visual Studio subscription (paid subscription), you MAY be able to use that for licensing your development environment as long as everyone who touches the dev environment has a visual studio subscription.
The above is all just my opinion on what you should do.
As with all advice you find on a random internet forum - you shouldn't blindly follow it. Always test on a test server to see if there is negative side effects before making changes to live!
I recommend you NEVER run "random code" you found online on any system you care about UNLESS you understand and can verify the code OR you don't care if the code trashes your system.
March 16, 2021 at 8:48 pm
The Licensing Guide can be downloaded from https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server/sql-server-2019-pricing
You'll quickly note in that doc that there are a variety of ways to buy the licenses with several different enterprise agreement options along with the retail option of buying SQL Standard licenses from a vendor. If you're looking at more than a few smallish (16 cores and less) instances, you could see some benefits to setting up a license agreement over a fixed term. A licensing professional can also take you through the changes these programs go through every few years; people like myself providing advice here may not be up-to-date on the current approaches.
A User CAL licenses a person to connect to any number of SQL Server instances in a single environment.
A Device CAL licenses a machine (web server, etc.) to connect to any number of SQL Server instances in a single environment. (See 'multiplexing/pooling' in the licensing docs - if users connect to a web server that serves up data from a SQL Server instance, then the web server needs a Device CAL and each user still needs a separate User CAL.)
Each person who connects to a SQL Server CAL-licensed instance must have their own CAL. You don't buy 10 CALs for 100 people assuming no more than 10 people will connect at a time. You buy a separate CAL for each person (100 total) who will connect to that instance, even if there's only one or two connections at a time. (See the full licensing doc, page 37, under "Licensing SQL Server in a multiplexed application environment")
CAL + Server licensing is cheaper if ((total # of users times cost per user CAL) + (total # of servers connecting to SQL instances) +(total # of servers times cost per server license)) is less than the total core cost of all the SQL instances to which they will connect. If the database is serving up data to the web, you're almost certainly better off going Core licensing.
Eddie Wuerch
MCM: SQL
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