Visual Studio Licensing Explained

Introduction

The objective behind today’s post, is to serve as an overview for all those who want to learn more on Visual Studio Licensing. In my role as a Specialist in the field, I have gotten a wide range of questions on the subject. These range from license specific exceptions, towards benefits and ending up in full range license optimization exercises.

 

Visual Studio Editions

In terms of Visual Studio, there are currently four editions used ;

• Visual Studio Code
• Visual Studio Community
• Visual Studio Professional
• Visual Studio Enterprise

Where Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio Community are free, they do differ quite from the others. Where we will go into the detail of those in more detail individually. To get a full feature comparison between Community, Professional & Enterprise, do check out this page ; https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/compare/

 

Product Terms

Looking for the product terms? You can find them here ; https://www.microsoft.com/licensing/terms/productoffering/VisualStudioSubscriptions/EAEAS

Azure : Oracle Licensing changes in 2017

Introduction

A question that I often receive is what about Oracle in the cloud? Because their license politics is far from virtualization friendly. The good news is that the policy is very clear in terms of cloud ;

Microsoft Azure – count one Azure CPU Core as equivalent to one Oracle Processor license.

The ugly thing is that since the end of January, the following statement was added ;

When counting Oracle Processor license requirements in Authorized Cloud Environments, the Oracle Processor Core Factor Table is not applicable.

Today’s post is to take a look at the licensing and how the current model (of 2017) impacts Azure customers.

MSSQL : What should I know about licensing HA/DR scenario’s in the cloud?

Introduction

This week I met a customer who described the following situation to me…

Where, to be honest, I was a it flabbergasted as I could not imagine this being true. So I read up on the matter, to see where this could possibly come from.

Over the course of the last years, I’ve been in contact with licensing way too much. Though in the end, this can really make a lot of difference in euros/dollars/… And that is what matters to the business!

Update (31 Oct 2019) : https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2019/10/30/new-high-availability-and-disaster-recovery-benefits-for-sql-server/

 

Bibliography

All things I’m going to say during this post use the following posts as foundation ;

• SQL 2016 Licensing guide
• Microsoft Product Usage Rights (PUR)
• Microsoft Licensing Review on “Failover  Rights”
• Licensing How To: SQL Server Fail-Over vs. Cold Disaster Recovery Rights.

Creative Commons

As some of you might have already noticed, my blog content is published under the Creative Commons Attribution license. I’m a true believer of the Open Source community and the Creative Commons licenses follow this vision for published content. For those who don’t (fully) know how these licenses work, check out the following slideset.

http://static.slideshare.net/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=cc-1219287412482466-9&stripped_title=creative-commons-presentation-562994