More and more organisations are looking at Virtualization as a solution to managing the growth in the number of SQL Server instances that today’s IS departments need to support. However there is still a lot of confusion surrounding the licensing for virtualized instances of SQL Server. The following article describes the licensing requirements for Virtualization and Multi-Instancing http://www.microsoft.com/sql/howtobuy/virtualization.mspx.
One thing to note that makes SQL server Enterprise Edition a great option for Virtualization is that if all processors in a machine have been licensed, then unlimited instances of SQL server 2005 can be run on unlimited virtual operating environments on that same machine.
Talking about SQL Server Virtualization at the March QLD SQL Server User Group on Thursday the 22nd of March Peter Fitzsimon from the Microsoft Global Solutions Technical Team will be presenting a session on running SQL Server on Virtual Server.
