Device CAL, User Cal or Processor license needed for SQL 2008 (architecture explained inside)?
- by nycgags
So we have a number of servers in the Amazon cloud running SQL Server Standard edition to aggregate data. For that purpose we are fine, the licensing is handled by our contract with Amazon, no problem there.
For the beefier work, we want to install Enterprise Edition (EE) on our servers processing raw data so that we can take advantage of table partitioning.
We currently have 3 servers aggregating data from about 40 node servers, all 43 of these servers are running standard edition which is fine. We also have 4 servers running standard processing the raw data, but I think we can get away with 2 (for redundancy) running Enterprise Edition. We have 2-3 dba's that access these DW servers for maintenance (using the same windows login via remote desktop). So visually:
40 -- 3 -- [2] -- 2 -- 1
nodes -- aggregators -- raw (which we want to run EE) -- calculators -- datawarehouse
Nodes PUSH to aggregators,
Raws PULL from aggregators,
Calculators PULL from Raw,
Calculators PUSH to datwarehouse
I am specifying the push vs. pull in case that changes how the # of licenses is calculated.
Q1) how many device (or user) CAL's do we need?
Q2) do I need to speak with someone from MSFT to find out if it is ok to install in the Amazon Cloud (Amazon said we need to verify it is ok in our license terms)?
Q3) what happens if another device tries to access a server with the limited number of device CAL's?
Q4) Are the device CAL's simultaneous number of devices or total?
Q5) Do Device and User CAL's cost the same or is there a difference?
Q6) Would we need to buy a processor license (we are hoping not to)?
