And it’s the larger footprints that have a greater challenge to address regarding whether they take a Bring Your Own Licence (BYOL) route or choose to use cloud service-included hourly licensing. For small to medium sized organisations, the decision is a little easier, as their initial licence investment will generally be lower. In this case, shifting to a cloud-based hourly licensing model provides an efficient way to adopt cloud services without having to deal with the complexity involved in licence management.

Larger organisations, however, may have significant fleets of licensed workload components, with major investments and volume discount arrangements already in place. If this describes your organisation, it is highly recommended that you take the time to properly analyse the details of any previously purchased volume licensing and entitlements.

To the untrained, the BYOL model is most frequently associated with complex licence mobility rules and entitlements of the product or product release version.

During a cloud migration project, Microsoft licensing for Windows Server and SQL Server will frequently be the sole focus of a licence optimisation exercise; however, other vendors may impose similar licence decision points. For example, Oracle’s products may require careful consideration to determine the impact on licence entitlements and how to maintain the workload performance versus the compute core (vCPU [virtual central processing unit] or CPU) allowance.

BUSINESS BENEFITS

The end goal of a licence optimisation is to reduce the IT operating costs, although there may be hidden benefits that need to be taken into account before any decisions are made. One key component that may have a significant impact during an Optimisation and Licensing Assessment (OLA) is a rightsizing exercise. Assessing the current on-premises utilisation (CPU, memory and disk) will help with recommendation of a cloud- based rightsized instance/virtual machine type. Rightsizing in terms of provisioned storage may further reduce backup volumes or backup licensing expenditure.

TIPS AND TRICKS TO OPTIMISING LICENSED WORKLOADS:

  • When opting for BYOL SQL Server licensing to run on your own shared AWS EC2 instance, the licence packs are sold in four-core packs per instance, irrespective of the number of vCPUs. This means that when a right-sizing exercise indicates that some of your four-vCPU servers can be downsized to two- vCPU servers and maintain the same performance, consolidating two databases on the same server will offer a reduction of one SQL Server licence and one Windows Server licence. Such a simple exercise lowers the overall maintenance effort, backup agent, anti-virus and even managed services fees.
  • If you’re considering a BYOL model, don’t forget that since 1 October 2019 additional constraints have been placed on Microsoft and SQL Server licences purchased after that date.
  • Licence optimisation for a SQL Server may go a step further in most public cloud environments. For example, if the SQL Server Enterprise was used exclusively to provide Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) for regulatory compliance, taking a moment to reassess the technology position will highlight that TDE is now a standard offering within both Amazon and Azure.
  • AWS’s OLA is an assessment program offered by Amazon Web Services to aid migrating customers in making rightsized and well-informed decisions on cloud licensing. On average, an assessment is conducted over a six-week period, and encompasses all infrastructure, operating systems, database engines and server utilisation.
  • The AWS OLA provides cost models for running Microsoft workloads on AWS, optimised for both licensing and compute. Using the complete set of infrastructure utilisation metrics, an AWS consulting partner can advise on the most appropriate target state infrastructure and build a total cost of ownership (TCO) model for your organisation’s cloud ecosystem.
  • An OLA engagement may also provide a key set of inputs to help build your organisation’s cloud migration business case.