I'm a junior system administrator, and I'm responsible for planning an upgrade for our on-site servers. I just want to ensure I'm on the right track before presenting my plan to my bosses. We're looking to purchase two servers, each with a total of 32 cores. We need to run four virtual machines (VMs) on each server. From my understanding, we will need either four Datacenter licenses (for 16 cores each) or eight Standard licenses (also 16 cores each) to cover the VMs. I'm leaning toward Standard licensing to save costs since I don't foresee a need for more than four VMs. We already have licenses for Server 2012 R2, Server 2016, and Server 2019 running on these VMs. Is there anything else I should consider in this scenario?
1 Answer
That setup sounds a bit overboard unless you expect high user traffic. Going for Datacenter licenses can be more beneficial in the long run since you can run unlimited VMs without worrying about licensing. Just remember, you can never predict future needs completely. Are you planning for a standalone setup or something like clustering for high availability?
Thanks for your input! The goal is to use these servers as on-premise Domain Controllers. The primary one will handle more resource-intensive VMs, while the secondary will serve as a backup and file server.