What is it?
Microsoft recently announced the preview of Subscription based licensing on Azure Stack HCI. This will allow you to purchase unlimited Windows Server guest licenses for your Azure Stack HCI cluster through your Azure subscription.
Please click the following link to see their official page:
Why is this a big deal?
Moving to subscription based licensing will remove all the complexity and uncertainty of previous licensing methods whilst ensuring you are always compliant and accurate in your licensing reporting to Microsoft. It’s also the best way to ensure you are getting the best value as you only pay for what you are using and can cancel at any time.
Typical Challenges
Anyone who has dealt with Windows licensing will understand the overheads involved in maintaining contracts, renewals, reporting and being as cost effective as possible. There’s a lot of work involved in managing agreements and at the end of it you still might not be getting the best value and, more importantly, might not be accurately reporting your production licenses to Microsoft.
Hand on heart, if Microsoft knocked on your door and wanted to audit all your Windows Licenses could you be 100% sure they won’t find any discrepancies? If not and that happened then you could be faced with hefty fines!
This alone is a good reason to plan to move to subscription licensing, but here are a few more:
- No monthly reporting and server scans
- No need to ensure licences are renewed
- No need to ensure SA is renewed
- No management of CALs
- Not locked into any features or benefits (SA)
- Always get latest features and updates
Cost
Subscription licensing is charged at $23.60 per physical core per month (per core of the physical cluster hardware). In that way it’s kind of like Datacenter licensing with a flat cost for unlimited guests (VMs).
Your first reaction maybe this seems a lot more when comparing to the Retail or Volume Licensing costs, but when you start factoring in things like Software Assurance, CALs, Administration overheads to manage agreements this new subscription based licensing model soon becomes a much more commercially viable option, in my opinion.
For greenfield solutions I would certainly recommend starting with this new licensing model. For existing solutions, where you have existing licensing investments, I would recommend formulating a plan to move to subscription licensing as soon as possible and within 1 – 2 years and depending on your renewal period.*
*These are my own opinions and I am not a licensing expert so please seek your own professional advice and perform your own cost comparisons