Determine your license requirements

Please note that you need licenses to use the Microsoft Windows Server. Microsoft's common license model is the so-called Server CAL model. This means that for legally compliant licensing, you need a license for operating a server as well as access licenses. You can choose between licensing according to users (User CALs) and devices (Device CALs).

To determine the license requirements for Windows Server 2016, Windows Server 2019 or Windows Server 2022, the following four rules must be observed. All rules are included in our license configurator so that you can calculate your requirements yourself.

Rule no. 1: Each physical processor is rated with at least eight cores.
Rule no. 2: Each physical server is evaluated with at least 16 cores.
Rule no.. 3: Taking rules 1 and 2 into account, all physical and active cores in the server must be licensed so that a standard server has two virtualization rights and a data center server has unlimited virtualization rights.
Rule no. 4: To obtain two additional VM rights with the Standard Edition, all physical active cores must be licensed again according to rules 1 and 2.