Of course 2010-2011 vintage two-socket servers only had up to 32 logical processors, so this wasn’t really an issue. Since SQL Server 2008 R2 still used processor-based licensing, there is no separate, lower license limit to the number of processor cores, beyond the higher 256 logical processor limit shared with SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition. This applies whether it is virtualized or not. SQL Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition also has a license limit of four processor sockets. Typical two-socket servers from 2008-2009 would only support anywhere from 32GB to 288GB of RAM. Since SQL Server 2008 will run on Windows Server 2012 R2, you could conceivably have up to 4TB of RAM with SQL Server 2008 Standard Edition, although most people will be running SQL Server 2008 Standard Edition on Windows Server 2008 R2 or older, which have lower RAM limits.
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SQL Server 2008 Standard Edition can use up to the operating system limit for RAM, just like SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition. Since SQL Server 2008 used processor-based licensing, there is no separate, lower license limit to the number of processor cores, beyond the 64 logical processor limit shared with SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition. SQL Server 2008 Standard Edition has a license limit of four processor sockets. You could also be forced to pay for SQL Server Standard Edition core licenses that you are not even allowed to use in a single instance. If you inadvertently use hardware or a VM that exceeds these per-instance license limits for SQL Server Standard Edition, you could have an unbalanced configuration that does not perform as well as it could.
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This is far from purely an academic exercise.
Sql server 2017 developer edition limitations upgrade#
One thing you need to consider as you are contemplating an upgrade and migration effort from a legacy version of SQL Server Standard Edition to a new version of SQL Server Standard Edition are the per instance license limits for memory, sockets, and physical cores.
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SQL Server Standard Edition License Limits