SQL Server Software Assurance Licensing Benefits for Disaster Recovery

If a customer is on-premises, then they get the following with Software Assurance for every core that is deployed on the primary:

• One free passive core for HA or DR on-premises;
• One free passive core for DR (async replication only);
• One free passive core for DR on SQL Server on Azure VM (async replication only).

If a customer is on Azure VM, then they get the following with Software Assurance for every core that is deployed on the primary:

• One free passive core for HA or DR on Azure VM;
• One free passive core for DR on Azure VM (async replication only).

Passive SQL Server Instance – the following operations are allowed a passive secondary :

• Database consistency — Maintenance operation;
• Log Backups;
• Full Backups;
• Monitoring applications can connect and gather data.