Before I start with my actual complains: I am a Linux administrator for over ten years now, but work as an executive for a Windows software development company since 2009. So expect me to know both, free/open source and proprietary, worlds very well. There are enough pro and cons for each of them, but mainly I prefer to work with open source solutions for technical reasons.

I spent the last two days with setting up a Windows 2008R2 Enterprise Server Core cluster with Microsoft SQL Server 2012 installed on it to test the new AlwaysOn Availability Groups cluster feature. Being responsible for our business critical services such as customer database, etc. I think it is pretty obvious why I want to run a SQL server AlwaysOn cluster spread over our two ESXi hosts. At about 95% of the setup done, I was asked how much it would cost if we’d really use it. I thought of a couple thousands of dollars, somewhat around 7 – 8.000 but wasn’t too sure about it. So I checked the official pricing information for the components I used:

2x Microsoft Windows 2008 R2 Enterprise	2x $1,699	$3.398
2x Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Enterprise	2x $27,496	$54,992
Overall costs		$58.390

Remark: The price per server for Microsoft SQL 2012 Enterprise is fucking high, as you have to pay $6,874 per core with a minimum of four cores.

I totally ticked of when I saw these figures: Nearly $60.000 for just securely storing some data that should be available 99.999% of the year. This is nothing about being able to affording it or not, but it’s just not possible to find reasonable arguments, why a small company with 17 employees should pay that much. This is a totally crappy, customer unfriendly, licensing model.