Demystifying Hardware - SQL Server 2012 Internals and Troubleshooting - page 36

was for two-socket servers, and the Intel Xeon 7xxx family was for four-socket (or more) servers.
Now you can get an Intel Xeon E5 family processor for a one-, two-, or four-socket server. You can
choose a Xeon E5-2400 series processor for a one- or two-socket server, a Xeon E5-2600 series
processor for a two-socket server, or a Xeon E5-4600 series processor for a four-socket server. You
can also get an Intel Xeon E7 family processor for a two-, four-, or eight-socket server. You can
choose a Xeon E7-2800 series processor for a two-socket server, a Xeon E7-4800 series processor
for a four-socket server, or a Xeon E7-8800 series processor for an eight-socket (or more) server.
These new options from Intel can be quite confusing to sort out unless you pay attention to the
details.
Prior to the release of SQL Server 2012, paying the price premium for the absolute best processor
available for each socket in your database server was an effective strategy for database server pro-
cessor selection. The SQL Server processor license cost was pretty high (even for Standard Edition),
so you wanted to get as much performance and scalability capacity as possible for each expensive
processor socket license that you purchased.
This is still a valid strategy for SQL Server 2008 R2 and earlier, but the licensing changes in
SQL Server 2012 Enterprise Edition dictate a few modii cations to this line of thinking. In early
November 2011, Microsoft announced some rather fundamental changes regarding how SQL
Server 2012 will be licensed compared to previous versions. SQL Server 2012 has three main
editions: Enterprise Edition, Business Intelligence Edition, and Standard Edition. The old Data
Center Edition and Workgroup Edition have been eliminated, which is probably no big loss. The
existing Developer and Express Editions are still available, along with Web Edition for hosting
providers.
Rather than the old, familiar socket-based licensing used in SQL Server 2008 R2 and earlier, SQL
Server 2012 uses a combination of core-based and Server + Client Access License (CAL) licens-
ing, depending on which edition you buy, and which choice you make for Standard Edition. With
Standard Edition, you can choose core-based licensing or Server + CAL-based licensing. With
Business Intelligence Edition, you have to use Server + CAL-based licensing, while Enterprise
Edition requires the use of core-based licensing. Standard Edition is the base edition, with a limit
of 16 physical processor cores. Microsoft decided to maintain the 64GB RAM limit for SQL Server
2012 Standard Edition (just like the 64GB RAM limit in SQL Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition).
Business Intelligence Edition includes all the functionality of Standard Edition, plus extra BI fea-
tures and functionality. Enterprise Edition includes everything in BI Edition, plus all the extra
Enterprise Edition features and functionality. Enterprise Edition is the top-of-the-line edition of
SQL Server 2012, now including all the features that were available in SQL Server 2008 R2 Data
Center Edition. As a DBA, you really want to use Enterprise Edition if you have any choice in the
matter, as it offers so many useful features, such as online index operations, data compression, and
AlwaysOn availability groups, to name a few.
If you are using core-based licensing (as you must for SQL Server 2012 Enterprise Edition), each
physical socket in your server must use a minimum of four core licenses. That means if you have
old hardware that uses dual-core processors, you still have to buy four core licenses for each socket.
That is yet another reason to not use ancient hardware for SQL Server 2012. Any Intel Xeon or
AMD Opteron processor that has only two physical cores was at least four to i ve years old by the
time SQL Server 2012 was released, so it really should be retired. Keep in mind that only physical