License table for Competency partners Refer to the Product Usage Guide for important details regarding license use rights and limitations about each software product or online service. The correct way to license is to stack your Standard editions on each of the hosts allowing for the highest possible number of VMs, even for 1 second or buy Datacenter which makes sense once you need more than 10 VMs per host based on this retail pricing. What if I want to upgrade to the Datacenter edition?
 
 

Windows Server R2 | Microsoft Volume Licensing

 
License the physical server completely with one Standard Core license per physical core to license a single virtual machine. Purchase the same number of licenses again to license an additional virtual machine. License the physical server completely with one Datacenter Core license per physical core to allow Windows Server to be run in an. Windows Server Standard Retail/OEM gets you 2 licenses, so you can run the host for “free” and 2 VMs on it. SPLA only gets you one VM per license set. Volume Licensing has a 2 CPU minimum per server, SPLA only requires one CPU to be licenses at a minimum. Windows Server R2 will continue to have the same licensing model as Windows Server , with two editions available in volume licensing: Standard edition and Datacenter edition. Editions are differentiated by virtualization rights only (two OSEs for Standard, and unlimited OSEs for Datacenter).