Windows Server Licensing 2025

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ighost09i

New Member
Feb 18, 2026
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Hello,

This is the first time our organization needs to run a windows VM on our Proxmox environment. We are currently using a trial for 2025 Windows Server Standard edition. However, we are going to get quotes from resellers on the licensing, but I have found different information on how the licensing actually works.

Do we need to only license the VM and it's amount of cores or the entire host cores? How does that change if we have a cluster for HA?

Any information or experience with windows server licensing would be great.

Thanks!
 
Standard = license each windows server instance
Datacenter = license all cores that will run Windows Server and run as many Windows server instances as you can fit
 
A license for the host's physical core count is required.

The core of all migration-capable hosts.

For a 10-core, 20-node PvE cluster, 16x20=320 licenses are required.

The minimum license count is 16, so even with 10 cores, it's 16.

Don't seek precise information here. Please contact Microsoft forums or paid support.

This is a PVE forum.
 
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Reactions: Johannes S
Thank you for the information, so it sounds like in HA we'd need to license all physical cores. Not just the windows VM running on our cluster
 
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