By my rough estimate such an SMB scenario will now cost almost three times to license. In the past that was a simple 2 x Windows Standard Server License (allowing up to 4 VM's irrespective of cores or CPU's). This is how they have really cranked up their revenue - by hitting small shops. They don't care how many cores YOU ACTUALLY USE. So let's say you have a plain old 6-core Proliant M元50 Gen8 and you are a small business with 3 VM's.you are going to need to license a total of 32-Cores. To answer my own question - not only is there a minimum of a 16-Core license requirement irrespective of your quad-core server - but that only includes the ability to use 2 VM's. On another note - why do you have to licence every core? If I allocate say 4 Cores to Server A and 8 Cores to server B and 8 Cores to Server C surely I only need to buy 20 Core-licenses?

What EXACTLY would I need to purchase to be fully licensed and compliant for all 12 VMs on that one host? I have no intentions of adding or migrating any additional VMs. I have a single VMware ESX host with 2 14-cores processors with Hyper-threading (judging from the MS licensing info, Hyper-threading has no bearing on core count) and I plan to run a total of 12 Windows Server 2012 (or 2016) VMs on that host. Here's what I'm looking for a definitive answer to, then I can calculate what I'll need for my other servers based on the calculations I get. If I ran 10 Windows Server 2012 Standard VMs, I purchased 5 Windows Server 2012 licenses to be compliant. It didn't matter if my host had 2 single-core processors or 2 14-core processors.

On a single physical VMware host with 2 physical processors and a varied number of cores per processor (with and without Hyper-threading), I would purchase a single Windows Server 2012 Standard license for every 2 Windows Server 2012 VMs I ran on that VMware host regardless of the number of cores that server had.

I'll skip the VMware licensing piece as it doesn't change but here is how I used to license Windows Server 2012. I know that Microsoft has adjusted the server licensing for server 2016 (not sure if this now applies to 2012 purchases as well) and they license on a per-core basis. I have multiple VMware ESX hosts running multiple Windows Server VMs (some 2008R2, some 2012R2). I have looked through a number of threads, but have yet to find one that nails down what I'm after.

Vmware workstation licensing