Standard edition. How to have 4 (or more) Virtual Machines

Copper Contributor

Hello,

 

My reseller can't explain me how to relicense a new server that I'm buying.

16 cores server. One Windows server 2016 St ed. and CALs.

 

How can i have 2 more VMs or even more!

Where I have to go to introduce a new Windows Server St Edition as the partner told me that I can buy 2 licenses and relicense my physical server to have more than 2 VMs.

 

Thanks!!

3 Replies

Hi Ivan,

If you are using Windows Server 2016 as a Hyper-V host, you will need to license it for Windows Server 2016 Datacenter edition to be able to have more than 2 VMs running on it.

 

See link for comparison of Standard and Datacenter editions - https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/ausoemteam/2017/03/03/comparison-of-standard-and-datacenter-edit...

 

Hope that helps!

Cheers.

Thank you Gerardo for hour quick reply.
O understand what you mean but the price of datacenter edition is ten times.
This reseller told me I can buy two licenses and install them in a single server to have double services about Windows server standard such as the VMs (4 in this case)
How can I do this configuration?

Hi Ivan,

 

Doesn't work like that.

  • A Standard edition license will cover licensing for the Hyper-V host and two VMs (essentially using the same key for all three installs)
  • But, installing Standard edition as you Hyper-V host and enabling the Hyper-V role will limit you to creating only 2 VMs

Adding another license key will do nothing.

If you can't afford licenses for Datacenter, the next best option would be to install Hyper-V Server 2016 as your host machine (this is free by the way), then you can create as many VMs as you like, but you will need to license all operating systems within the VMs.