The Per-Core licensing cost for SQL Server and now Windows too is really a pain, and getting worse with more and more cores showing up in boxes. We've got some

The Per-Core licensing cost for SQL Server and now Windows too is really a pain, and getting worse with more and more cores showing up in boxes. We've got some servers that would be happy to putt along on 2-4 cores, but we're struggling to find anything less than 12 cores with our managed hosting provider - so we have to pay for the extra cores, even though we don't want to use them. "Consolidate!" - sure, but we can only do that so much. Some stuff we have to deploy regionally for latency reasons, other stuff can't share hardware for PCI compliance reasons. We don't want to have production environments sharing with dev.