Cold Disaster Backup Recovery Rights

This is a Software Assurance benefit

For each instance of eligible server software you run in a physical or virtual operating system environment on a licensed server, you may temporarily run a backup instance in a physical or virtual operating system environment on a server dedicated to disaster recovery. The product use rights for the software and the following limitations apply to your use of software on a disaster recovery server.

· The server must be turned off except for (i) limited software self-testing and patch management, or (ii) disaster recovery.

· The server may not be in the same cluster as the production server.

· You may run the backup and production instances at the same time only while recovering the production instance from a disaster.

· Your right to run the backup instances ends when your Software Assurance coverage ends.

Also... disaster recovery (D/R) can now be tested once every 90 days with the D/R VMs live for a brief amount of time. Microsoft does not define brief. If you are using Site Recovery Manager, the D/R side can be running during the exercise and not need to incur a cost if the test is run every 90 days or more. (1)

Fail-Over Rights

Fail-over Rights for Microsoft SQL Server do not require Software Assurance (SA) coverage prior to SQL2014.. but they do need it after SQL2014.

SQL2017

For each server licensed with SQL Server 2017 and covered by active SA, customers can run up to the same number of passive failover instances in a separate, OSE to support failover events. A passive SQL Server instance is one that is not serving SQL Server data to clients or running active SQL Server workloads.

SQL2019

For each on-prem server OSE licensed with SQL Server 2019 and covered by active SA, customers can use the following passive replicas in anticipation of a failover event: 

• One passive fail-over replica for High Availability in a separate OSE 

• One passive fail-over replica for Disaster Recovery in a separate OSE 

• One passive fail-over replica for Disaster Recovery in a single VM on Azure

• You can offload corruption checks (DBCC), full backups, and log backups. And, you can monitor resource usage data.

• You cannot query them. As soon as they are readable, they need to be licensed.

• For host-based licensing, the primary and D/R hosts can have the same or less cores. If the D/R server has more cores, you need to have the same number of cores licensed on the primary. For example, the primary host has 56 cores and D/R has 64. The primary host would need 8 more cores of licensing. (1)

Bibliography & References