After meeting with Microsoft today to discuss our existing licenses and software assurance level, my organization gave SQL Server 2012 the green light!  With our existing software assurance agreement, we will be grandfathered in to the new structure.  Thus, when we renew our agreement in 2014, we will convert our existing processor based enterprise licenses to their equivalent core based licenses without additional penalty.  That conversion had management worried and there was  even discussion of staying on 2008 R2 for as long as feasibly possible, which no DBA wants to hear. 

With the grandfathering process, there will be a concerted push to build some new clusters so that they may be grandfathered in as well, especially since we found out that our new acceptance cluster did not count against our licenses if we had the appropriate MSDN licenses for our three SQL DBAs.  Personally, I was worried that the new licensing structure may derail some of management’s plans to reduce our Oracle footprint onto SQL Server.  If that had been derailed, my plans for global domination would have once again been thwarted by those darn meddling kids.  Or was that just old man Smithers channeling through me again?

Enjoy!