While designing a Disaster Recovery solution, while most part of the project is targeted at the techological level, is it worth to deal also with licensing.
Some involved technologies like those from Microsoft require checks on the owned licenses, to avoid violations of license agreements during the execution of Disaster Recovery plans.
In this white paper, I’m going to describe how Microsoft licensing works in disaster Recovery. You can download it from this link:
Hi,
I know this is an old article but I think there’s an option that’s left unconsidered by your white paper. I would argue that purchasing software assurance is a bad decision if it is made solely on the basis of DR licensing. In many situations the licenses allocated to the cluster may be quite broad in order to run a myriad of systems, however the systems that require full DR are generally much fewer in number. It is frequently cheaper to purchase a second full license for DR than to purchase SA on the entire cluster, in most cases the server license is not even that expensive and most of the expense is in the CALs which are unaffected by DR but are definitely affected by SA. With something like a windows license, your cluster may have 20+ DataCenter processor licenses which adds up very quickly with SA, whilst another 4 DataCenter processor licenses might cover all of DR and also allow utilisation of that DR hardware for non-DR purposes (eg testing).
Cheers