Resellers and industry experts must be very careful when promoting Azure Arc as an alternative (cheaper solution) to other licensing programs. Windows and SQL are always looked at as a product only, but as you know, there are extra costs in supporting it. I had a hoster email me this the other day:

‍Apparently, Windows 2025 can now also be purchased as a hybrid license via ARC... although I don't quite see how this can be made cheaper in a hypervisor-based environment than it is currently, especially with all the additional hassle of bringing VMs up and down. I think the management costs will skyrocket because you’ll either need a very good tool to manage it (and those aren’t cheap), or administrators will be spending their entire day manually turning VMs on and off (either because the cheaper tools don’t do it well or because custom scripts are unreliable)."

I had another conversation with a partner who stated something similar:

Microsoft sells it as being useful for temporary "scale-out" or "scale-up" scenarios but (for SQL Server) any DBA can tell you that this won't work. 

  • Scale-out (adding additional database servers) is in many cases not a technically feasible option (unless your solution was designed for scale-out)
  • Scale-up (increasing cpu/memory of an existing server) is also an unlikely scenario as you can't "supplement" your SQL (SPLA or LM/FVB) licensed server with some "additional" PAYG licenses to top it off... the whole server will need to be licensed based on SQL PAYG whilst your existing licenses will still cost you money.

For Windows-based application front and/or mid-end servers (not running SQL), PAYG might be useful if you only need to add capacity for a limited time. But even then, the Windows PAYG costs are high. Even if you are charged by the hour, the break-even point compared to Windows SPLA, EA+SA, or Server Software Subscriptions will be reached much quicker, as expected. 

Here’s the bottom line: in any situation, whether it’s an audit, outsourcing your data center, or using tools such as Azure Arc, it is critical to understand what is happening inside your own data center. That’s where Octopus Cloud can help. You must have control of your current licensing costs to see if it is more cost-effective using any alternative to SPLA.  

In Summary:

  • You MUST understand your own data center before moving customer workloads.
  • How many resources (personnel) are you using to manage scaling up or down scenarios?
  • Do you plan to move to different cloud providers?
  • In Azure Arc, you control the end customer less than you would with SPLA. 
  • Kind of like the Godfather, it’s difficult to leave. “I thought I was out, they bring me back in…”
  • In Azure Arc, you do receive incentives but are difficult to track and always goes one direction…down.

Thanks for reading,

SPLA Man