As a consultant, I sometimes see SQL Servers with high CPU core counts relative to their workload. For example, the situation that inspired this post was seeing half a dozen SQL Servers with ~50 cores each, hundreds of cores total – yet they consistently had just 1-5% CPU usage.

Here’s what I said to management:

Right now, you’re running SQL Server on 280 cores. SQL Server Enterprise Edition licensing is about $7,000 per core, so you’ve installed $1,960,000 worth of licensing. If an employee or former employee goes to the BSA and reports you, they may get a pretty sizable cash reward. I’m not the licensing police, and I’m not going to ask if you actually paid for that licensing. I’m going to phrase my question very carefully: would you like help reducing your licensing footprint?

Every now and then, the managers on the call say the company actually is licensed for that many cores, and it usually involves a funny story about someone getting a really good deal. For example, one of my clients got an amazing licensing agreement with Microsoft where they paid for very few cores initially, and they only had to “true up” their licensing every 5 years. Immediately after signing the agreement, they installed dozens of large Enterprise Edition servers. They knew they wouldn’t have to pay for those servers for another 5 years, and by then, they expected their company to be acquired by a much larger one. Good times.

But most of the time, the managers get really wide eyes, and they start stammering and making excuses. On this particular call, the manager immediately started telling the employees, “Don’t get any ideas about reporting us,” and laughed nervously.

I’m completely chill about it – after all, it’s not like their company owes ME for the licensing, and I’m not about to be the one who calls the BSA. Besides, the terms & conditions for BSA rewards are hilariously bad, making it pretty damn unlikely that anybody ever gets a reward. I do like mentioning that, though, because it gives managers an incentive to fix the problem quickly.

The reason I care, as a consultant, is that often:

• Managers didn’t realize how much money is at stake.
• Once they know, their performance problems become a much bigger issue (because now they’re concerned about cutting horsepower.)
• Once they know, the project often changes scope – because now we’re probably going to build new SQL Servers with dramatically lower core counts, and migrate over to those.

When we build those new SQL Servers, we can make other corrective changes that will help their particular bottlenecks. For example, if the workload is memory-starved, we can throw much more memory in the new boxes – because management now understands that the cost of a terabyte of memory is nothing compared to a $2M licensing bill.

This usually starts a whole new discussion with management, and the next step usually involves discussing my 7 rules for SQL Server licensing.

So far, there have only been a couple of times in my career when the client’s management decides that they’re going to keep pirating SQL Server. As a consultant, I don’t wanna go anywhere near companies like that – because when the licensing police inevitably come calling, the company will say, “Well, Brent Ozar worked on these systems, and he told us that it was completely fine.” That’s why I’m out as soon as I find out that the company is purposely pirating the software, and on my way out the door, I leave a very clear paper trail behind me.