In that situation, you might want to choose the twelve-core E5-2697 v2.
#Sql server 2012 enterprise edition pricing software license
For example, in most situations, I would have no problem with someone picking a six-core E5-2643 v2 instead of an eight-core E5-2667 v2, and saving $27,496.00 in software license costs! That would pay for the server itself, with money left over.Īnother strategy might be valid if you were trying to replace an older four-socket server with a two socket server and you were concerned about whether the two socket server could handle the total concurrent workload. Quite often, financial considerations may guide you to lower core count model. Your final choice might be constrained by your software license budget, since each Enterprise physical core license will cost $6,874.00 (at least with SQL Server 2012 Enterprise Edition pricing). If you want the best single-threaded processor performance (which is very important for OLTP workloads), and the overall magnitude of your workload (in terms of number of concurrent users or batch requests per second) is on the smaller side, you should be focused on the E5-2667 v2, E5-2643 v2 or the E5-2637 v2. You need to consider your workload and your budget as you make your final processor choice.
Having a larger 元 cache is very helpful for database server performance, since 元 cache is significantly faster than main memory access.īearing all of this in mind helps you narrow down your choices even further. Another factor to notice is that some of the lower core count models have the same 元 cache size as the next higher core count processor in the table, which gives each physical core a larger portion of the 元 cache to work with (since the 元 cache is shared between all of the cores). You might notice that the lower core-count processors tend to have higher base clock speeds than their higher core count brethren, which is actually quite significant for single-threaded processor performance. Your choice then comes down to your desired physical core count for each processor, which drives your SQL Server 2014 licensing costs. If there are multiple models from the same product family with the same physical core count, you should prefer the one with the highest base clock speed, turbo clock speed, the highest Intel QPI speed and the largest shared- 元 cache size.īy those criteria, we get the five processor models shown in Table 1. You need to keep in mind that only physical cores count for licensing purposes (on non-virtualized servers). You might be wondering how I can so quickly discard so many of Intel’s new Xeon E5-2600 v2 processor models. Table 1: Recommended Xeon E5-2600 v2 Processor Models for SQL Server 2012/2014 Table 1 shows the relevant specifications for these five processors. These are the twelve-core Xeon E5-2697 v2, the ten-core Xeon E5-2690 v2, the eight-core Xeon E5-2667 v2, the six-core Xeon E5-2643 v2, or the four-core Xeon E5-2637 v2. When you think about how SQL Server 2012/2014 licensing works, and you want the best performance possible for the lowest license cost, you can pretty quickly narrow down that list to just five processors.
Currently, there are 22 different processors in this family, which seems like an overwhelming number of choices. Over the past year, Intel has released the 22nm Intel Xeon E5-2600 v2 Product Family (Ivy Bridge-EP) of processors for two-socket servers.
Don’t just let “Shon the server guy” pick what processors to buy for your new database server! Two-Socket Servers The difference in SQL Server 2014 licensing costs between a good processor choice and a bad processor choice can more than pay for your hardware and at least a portion of your storage subsystem in many cases, so this is something you need to pay attention to as a database professional. I do hope that Microsoft will make some changes to the artificially low hardware license limits for SQL Server Standard Edition. I would not be surprised to see some minor price increases in the license cost per core, but I would be very surprised to see any major changes to how core-based licensing works. My assumption is that SQL Server 2014 will use the same core-based licensing model that SQL Server 2012 does, since I have not heard any public announcements otherwise. Since SQL Server 2014 is due to be released sometime in early 2014 ( according to Mary Jo Foley), it seems like a good time to revisit this subject, and see what might have changed over the past twelve months. Just about a year ago, I wrote Selecting a Processor for SQL Server 2012.