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How many Licences per Exchange Cluster?

I was talking to a customer this morning about Exchange and configuring Active/Active/Active/Passive clustering and the topic came around to licences and how many were required in the cluster.  I get this question quite frequently in customer meetings, so I thought I'd see if the information on the web was clear enough.  From the Exchange web site it says: "All servers in a cluster that are running Exchange Server require a licence. Note that Exchange Server 2003 Enterprise Edition is required for clustered configurations"

This means that the Passive Exchange node also needs a licence which was the part my customer was unaware of.  Exchange has been installed on the passive node, but not initialised as part of cluster fail-over: therefore it needs a valid licence.

 

Published Monday, November 01, 2004 2:23 PM by Eileen_Brown
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Comments

Monday, November 01, 2004 4:06 PM by Jerry Dennany

# re: How many Licences per Exchange Cluster?

No wonder your customer was confused. This is the exact opposite of the licencing requirement for SQL Server 2000, where no second licence is required for active / passive configurations.

http://www.microsoft.com/sql/howtobuy/faq.asp
Monday, November 01, 2004 4:16 PM by Lawrence Liu

# re: How many Licences per Exchange Cluster?

Jerry, I believe that Microsoft did that (for clusters) to match Oracle's licensing model. However, customers should note the licensing requirements below for log shipping-based fail-over scenarios.

Q. If I am doing log shipping in an active/passive failover configuration, how should I license the backup server?

A. In this scenario, the active and passive servers must be licensed identically, so that the passive server can process the same workload as the active server in the event of a failover.

Wednesday, November 10, 2004 9:42 PM by Davinder

# re: How many Licences per Exchange Cluster?

If you run a packaged cluster that effectively has two active nodes and on the 1st node you run SQL or Exchange, the above suggests that you need another SQL or Exchange licence for the second node.

What about the CAL's? Do you need to buy, say 25 for the 1st and then another 25 for the other?
Thursday, November 11, 2004 10:16 PM by Eileen Brown

# re: How many Licences per Exchange Cluster?

CALs are not licensed that way. You buy CALs for users or devices to access any number of servers that the CAL licenses correspond with.
For example if you have 4 Exchange Servers (clustered in an Active / Passive setup, so only 2 are active)and 2000 users in the company, you would need 2000 Exchange CALs.

Tuesday, November 23, 2004 3:04 PM by vahid

# re: How many Licences per Exchange Cluster?

hi
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