Once License gets updated successfully, you will see all green check in the below image.You are all ready to upgrade the edition.If you are getting any warning or error, verify and try to fix it before going with the next step. If all the rules show as passed, you are good to go ahead. Now, It checks all rules for edition upgrade.Select the SQL Server Instance for which you are going to change license key if you have multiple instances and Click on Next button.Accept License Term and Condition and Click on Next button to proceed.Once you click on the Edition upgrade button, next window will come to enter the License Key or product Key of SQL Server Instance.Select first option Edition Upgrade as shown in below image and click Next. You can see multiple options in the right side pane. Click on Maintenance tab from left side pane.Open the SQL Server installation media and run the setup.exe. OR If you have SQL already installed, then you can also launch “Installation Center” by going to Start->Programs ->Microsoft SQL Server 2016->Configuration Tools-> SQL Server Installation Center.While changing the product key, there is no “real” edition upgrade. These are the same steps which are required to upgrade the edition of SQL Server. The steps to update the product key is very simple. Here is how the CPU utilization looks on the server. Once the product key got updated successfully, SQL Server was able to use all the core of the box.

So, I updated the SQL Server Edition from “Server+CAL” to “CORE” model. I started wondering why SQL Server is using the just 20 logical CPUs then I found that we were using enterprise edition with “Server+CAL” licensing model. When I checked the box to know how many CPU the box got, it surprised me because it got 224 logical cores. When I started ramping-up more and more workload on the server, I found the SQL Server was using only 20 CPUs. Yesterday, I was doing SQL Server Database stress and benchmarking testing on the client side.

Toad for sql server license serial key