as many organizations experienced recently, Microsoft changed the way customer should license Windows Server Standard and Windows Server Datacenter from processors to cores.

customers who’s affected by this change are customers which renewed the Enterprise Agreement during the past ~6 months.

midterm customers do not impact by this change until the coming renewal.

while this change start to affect customers around the world , Microsoft shows a great interest in new technology and also relatively quietly acquired DEIS to keep up with the rapid adoption of container technology. https://deis.com/

in June Product Terms you can see the following definitions:

Windows Server Container is a feature of Windows Server software.

Hyper-V Container is a feature of Windows Server that utilizes a virtual operating system environment. Each Hyper-V Container is considered to be one Virtual OSE.

for Windows Server Standard and Datacenter : Customer may use any number of OSEs Instantiated as Windows Server Containers on the Licensed Server.

Looking at the definition above it seems that the licensing rules by Microsoft quickly adopting to the market changes and may set the infrastructure for the future licensing models for Windows Server.