Microsoft Licensing /w Proxmox VE - safe vs risky ways

[ZephWyrm]

Hello guys and girls,

On my current workplace I have the opportunity to refresh our entire infrastructure and I am thinking about using Proxmox VE HA cluster for our HyperVisor needs - with enterprise licensing and probably also a Proxmox Backup implementation.

Current infrastructure is using Microsoft Hyper-V and our virtualization needs employ mostly Windows Server OS (with several instances of Failover Clustering)

I am thinking about implementing a fully converged scenario with Proxmox and Ceph.

Since I am trying to increase the chances I am thinking about the Microsoft Licensing part being an easy way to cut down on costs (we are certainly going to need Datacenter version of licensing)

Microsoft licensing rules state that you have to license every physical host running VMs. I am thinking about buying a single Datacenter 2022 license. Is this going to cause problems in your opinion/experience?

In terms of hardware the best offers price wise point me towards either a SuperMicro 4-node BigTwin or 3x RR650xs Dell servers.

Thank you in advance.
Zephyros.

 

[LnxBil]

Microsoft licensing rules state that you have to license every physical host running VMs. I am thinking about buying a single Datacenter 2022 license. Is this going to cause problems in your opinion/experience?

Yes, this would be underlicensed. All mayor players have this "license per host" thing and similar socket/core licenses. I recommend - as with Hyper-V - license every host and you're good to go from a licensing standpoint. Was there a previous licensing audit in your company? I would assume that if you had e.g. 6 and now would only license one, they would probably schedule and audit to see why this went down.

 

[ZephWyrm]

Previous licensing needs where covered via 3rd party MSP VLSC. As this effort follows a broader narrative towards IT independence, this is something (purchasing even 1 Datacenter License) that will get logged/show up as growth instead of reduction (in case of an audit).

But I digress; I know this is wishful thinking. The train of thought I followed was that in essence for all intents and purposes this HA cluster could be perceived as a single host. The "further down the well" question is: will it work - even temporarily?

Thanks a lot.

 

[LnxBil]

Previous licensing needs where covered via 3rd party MSP VLSC. As this effort follows a broader narrative towards IT independence, this is something (purchasing even 1 Datacenter License) that will get logged/show up as growth instead of reduction (in case of an audit).

Ah okay. I normally see datacenter per host as it is in any VMware/Hyper-V and PVE environment I worked with.

But I digress; I know this is wishful thinking. The train of thought I followed was that in essence for all intents and purposes this HA cluster could be perceived as a single host. The "further down the well" question is: will it work - even temporarily?

This is the same for any other licensing I know. Every sane person would say "yes", but that is unfortunately not what I see in the field (not with MS but with Oracle). On the oracle side, the licensing center will check if you have "#CPU sockets in your cluster" licenses for per-socket licensing even if you only have one VM that can physically not run on all hosts at the same time (and you're not on Oracle VM, Oracle's own virtualization). There are - as with any licensing advise online - people that state, that this is not true, but it is what we see in audits. Therefore buying real hardware and use Oracle Standby/HA features is cheaper then virtualizing Oracle (on non-Oracle-VM hypervisors).

 

[VictorSTS]

This is a complex issue. It's been a while since my last Hyper-V setup, but at the time the "buy one datacenter license for each physical host and run as many VM's as you want" was restricted by:

- Using the same Windows version on every host and VM (i.e. desktop Windows versions needed their own license).
- The VM's had to run under Hyper-V (the licensing model was not valid with any other hypervisor).
- You had to license every host with all the sockets/cores they may have.

Whether all of them all enforced by an audit is yet to see, as at the time we did tick all the boxes and had no issues with the audit. Don't know the current status of the licensing terms, unfortunately.