Licensing Windows Server 2022 - 2 Core and 16 Core.

Necro this article because of past and upcoming changes.

VINEIT if the DELL Server has 2 physical CPUs and 12 physical cores in total, then yes. 16-core pack for this device, for a regular Standard or Datacenter licensing.
Standard or Datacenter Edition is based on the amount of VMs
Azure Stack HCI requires Datacenter Edition

If it is one physical CPU with 12 physical Core you can mix and match to license 12 cores, like 6x 2 Core Packs of the same edition or other packs and filling up the rest with 2-core packs.

Mind that packs are available in different sizes with different rebates. So 1x 16-core pack might be even cheaper than 6x 2-core packs.

At times I've even seen 4-core packs in volume licensing price lists.

CSP (CSP Subscription mostly recommended due to the release of WS 2025 and more reasons), offer 8-core packs, only.


Understanding Licensing packs
License packs are literally packs. They can be seperated to be assigned to physical cores and even different servers. Like you can take one bottle of beer from a pack of 6. 

The only thing is you have to take care about your paperwork in your SAM / Excel in case of an audit, that it remains clear what you did and most importantly when.

The reason for 8-core packs in CSP Subscription is that everything is licensed as in Azure.
Also CSP Subscription would allow a per VM licensing.

"Per VM" licensing
In opposite / or even in addition to "per core licensing", you can add more licenses 
This makes especially sense in very special cases when having larger clusters with VMware or Proxmox or Azure Stack HCI, but only VERY few Windows Server VMs running on these and you want them to move within the cluster, without licensing every CPU core in this cluster. 

The rule here is 8-core pack "per VM", license still assigned to the HW but it can move. The number of virtual CPUs of the VM is near irrelevant. It is 8 or a multiple of 8 like 8, 16, 24 etc.
so 2 vCPUs still require a minimum  8-core pack for this VM.

Thank you for the excellent summary RobinCM 

Windows Server licensing has a quite an amount of caveats but also chances to save 🙂 
It depends on the licensing model (Volume Licensing like Open, Enterprise Agreement), CSP, SPLA (for hosting) etc. pp. Variety of Azure Benefits, BYOL benefits etc pp. 

Even the perfect stated rule of Dave Patrick becomes obsolete as soon choose for "per VM" licensing.
OEM licensing even allows to "break" the 8 Core per CPU / 16 Core per Server rule and allow you to pay only active CPU cores (de/activated to and present to the OS via UEFI setup), but this comes not handy if you want to add Volume Licensing Software Assurance. And then again the paperwork. Cannot really recommend unless you bought an OEM box with no intentions for Software Assurance and oversized the CPUs for whatever reasons.

Windows Server 2025 will offer on-demand licensing, but we consider it before not written in Product Terms.


Microsoft Licensing is often like white magic, and there is one source of trust to study:
Everything about it can be found here (and trusted for audit only here): https://www.microsoft.com/licensing/terms/
All other sources are complementary and not binding for audits (including my posting) 😉

Before checking details
- choose your licensing program you are into on the top bar
- if any, mind your licensing commitments to Microsoft (like MPSA, Enterprise Agreement), that you might not license certain products via other programs
- if you need to know the terms back in time of purchase use the date picker (if you know what you are doing). 

I could recommend a good tutor on YT, but still Product terms beat any other information.