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jfkilleen avatar image
jfkilleen asked

Availability Groups - Licensing question for Passive Secondary.

Hi

I understand that Enterprise with SA allows for a passive secondary server which does not require a license.

However If I have multiple Availability Groups on an instance, or multiple instances on a VM each its own AG and I have to failover just 1 AG, does the Secondary server need to be Licensed as there are now active databases on both servers as all other AGs are still on the 'primary'?

Hope that makes sense. I cant seem to find a definitive yes or no. I am thinking that the secondary does need to be licensed in this case which would render that feature of SA fairly useless for a lot of companies.

Thanks in advance

John

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Kev Riley avatar image
Kev Riley answered

As soon as an AG becomes primary on the secondary server, it needs to be licensed.

Yes, SA gives the ability to have passive secondary servers for HA or DR for free, the operative word there being 'passive'. If you have AGs mixed across servers, then those servers are no longer purely passive for HA or DR, you are effectively scaling-out.

The SA benefit is the free license for 1 on-prem HA, 1 on-prem DR and 1 Azure DR.

Without SA, you need to pay for those

https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2019/10/30/new-high-availability-and-disaster-recovery-benefits-for-sql-server/

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