10.011 Managing Microsoft SQL Processor Core licenses

With version 10.0.11, BigFix Inventory supports a new metric "Microsoft SQL Server Physical Processor Cores" for the per core physical licensing model. The metric is in line with the latest Microsoft product license terms. For the list of license terms, refer to Microsoft SQL Server Product Terms/.

The new metric is calculated as per the given current day and follows the latest Microsoft SQL Server product terms. This new metric is calculated once the contract is defined to give SAM full control for the specific contract and group it is needed. Enabling license usage calculation on computer group definition to calculate this metric is no longer required. This new metric is managed through contract definition and due to this reason, its value is not presented in All metrics panel.

Supported metric

The below table shows the metric supported for Microsoft Processor Core licenses:
ID Code Name Description
-13314 SQL_SERVER_MICROSOFT_PHYSICAL_PROCESSOR_CORES Microsoft SQL Server Physical Processor Cores
This metric is dedicated to "Microsoft SQL Server Standard Edition" and "Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise Edition" products .

Metric calculation

The metric calculation is based on the below rules:

  • Metric value is calculated only for products that are part of the contract.
  • The calculated value is visible on "All Contracts" and "Product Metrics per Contract" panels.
Method to calculate the metric value for a product:
Metric value for a product = sum of calculated values for each physical server with product or with VM with a product.
Metric value for a server = number of server cores, minimum 4 cores per physical processor.
Note: The metric is calculated only when there is a contract created with it. Its value is no longer visible from the All Metrics panel.

Examples

SQL Server Microsoft Physical Processor Core
There are two hosts. Each of them has two processors (Server Active Sockets) and there are 16 cores per processor (total 32 Server Cores).
Microsoft SQL Server has been detected on 3 virtual machines. Two of them run on the first host, another one on the second.
According to the algorithm, both processors from the first host exceed the minimum value of 4 cores per processor, so 2x16 cores will be counted as a total number of cores for the metric. Also, the second has the 32 cores, this time 4 processors 8 cores each, so another 32 cores will be added to the calculation. Total number of cores is 64.

SQL Server Microsoft Physical Processor Core
In this example 'Server Cores' and 'Server Active Sockets' value is different on the second host. There are 8 server cores, however minimum cores per processor is 4 and we have 4 processors, so the cores value for this server will be 16.
According to the algorithm, we have 32 cores for the first host and 16 cores for second, so we have 48 cores as a result.

Additional SQL Server simplifications

You will have to manually manage a situation when there are VMs on a server with SQL Server Standard and you will classify them to be calculated per Physical Processor Core. This is required by Microsoft license terms for SQL Server Standard and BigFix Inventory does not handle this situation automatically. Normally customer should reassign such instances to Virtual Processor Core metric.