ConfigMgr 2012 Licensing - Calculations explained for Dummies

Hi.. Recently i had to calculate the number of licenses required for a ConfigMgr 2012 R2 Hierarchy to project that to my management.

The design was like with single primary and multiple remote DP's to support Few K workstations and few servers.

 I've gone through the Licensing documents provided by microsoft and i over read it as always. It confused me a lot. So i decided to raise a thread in technet and Gerry Hampson was able to clarify few things about the licensing.

From what i've taken from the thread i decide to make this post about ConfigMgr 2012 Licensing in a very simple manner.

The first that i missed from the document is

"License required only for endpoints being managed. No additional licenses are needed for management servers or SQL Server technology."

So that it, We dont require license for ConfigMgr CAS, Primary, Secondary, DP's and any other functional roles installed in a ConfigMgr Hierarchy

we require license only if you are going to manage those servers through ConfigMgr.

We have Two kind of Client management license to address specific needs.

1. ConfigMgr 2012 Workstation client licenses
2. ConfigMgr 2012 Managed server Licenses

ConfigMgr 2012 Workstation Client Licenses

  This license is required for all non Server OS ConfigMgr clients that is Workstation clients. But it's not limitted to Windows clients. The number of license required is calculated based on "Per License Per Client". The product name of this license is "Configuration Manager Client ML" and it cost $62 per license

 Suppose if you have 20K no server clients in your environment you would require 20K Configuration Manager Client ML to manage those client through ConfigMgr.

ConfigMgr 2012 Managed Server Licenses
SML's (Server management Licenses) cannot be purchased for ConfigMgr alone and it's for the whole system center.

SML's are needed to manage Server clients through ConfigMgr. And to address the virtualization complexities microsoft introduces another licensing method and it has two Editions.

1. Microsoft system center 2012 R2 Datacenter
2. Microsoft System center 2012 R2 Standard

components that are covered aunder two editions are shown above.

The differences in the supported numbers and cost of the editions are shown above.

From the above image, it's clear that the Standard edition is apt for physical servers and the datacenter edition is apt for virtualized servers.

Let's do the calculation now.

Environment :

1. 2 Physical servers with two physical processors each
2. 1 virtualized server with 10 OSE's running on it through Hyper-V (Google it to know about OSE)
3. 1000 Workstation clients.

License requirement

1. A standard edition license will support two physical processors and each server has two physical processors we require two Standard SML's ($2646)

2. As in the virtualized server there are 11 OSE's running on it, if we go for standard edition SML's, we would require (11/2 = 5.5 = 6) 6 standard edition of SML and that would cost us $7938. Instead if we go for Datacenter edition SML, a single datacenter edition SML is enoug to licence all the OSE's running on the server. So we would require 1 Datacenter SML and the cost is verymuch lesser when compared to Standard SML's (3607)

3. For 1000 clients we would require 1000 Client management licenses (1000*62=62000) $62000

The cost described above is based on the System center 2012 licensing anf if you have Service assurance or Enterprise agreement the cost will vary.

Hope this helps.
                                                                                                                                   Techytipz

Posted in: ConfigMgr