Skip to main content

Microsoft licensing and IT test servers











It's pretty common to hear people recommend using a "test server" for testing everything from backup/restore to software patches.



Some Microsoft server products are fairly expensive. Are people really buying additional licenses for testing purposes? I can see buying extra hardware, but the cost of duplicate software could get pretty outrageous.



I've looked in to MSDN and Technet but licenses obtained via these subscriptions don't seem to be appropriate for "IT" testing, only development testing and evaluation. I suppose one could always use trial products, but what a hassle...and perhaps that's even a violation of the trial agreement.



So I'm not trying to start an ethical debate or anything. I'm wondering what the most cost effective approach would be. Is there an alternative to buying full retail licenses? (Specifically, products like Windows Server, Exchange Server, SQL Server, and Sharepoint.)


Answer



Licences obtained through Technet (or MSDN) are the most common way of doing this. These licences are aimed at use for just that. They cannot be used in live production environments, but are there for testing, training and development. Whether you consider testing, as testing an application, or testing an infrastructure setup.




I believe Technet subscription does not allow you to use your licences for development and test of applications, where as MSDN does.



If you cannot afford a Technet or MSDN subscription, most Microsoft server software is available for a limited time based trial, often more than enough to test, or train for a specific purpose. Microsoft even provide pre-setup virtual machines for this sort of thing, for products like Exchange and OCS.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

iLO 3 Firmware Update (HP Proliant DL380 G7)

The iLO web interface allows me to upload a .bin file ( Obtain the firmware image (.bin) file from the Online ROM Flash Component for HP Integrated Lights-Out. ) The iLO web interface redirects me to a page in the HP support website ( http://www.hp.com/go/iLO ) where I am supposed to find this .bin firmware, but no luck for me. The support website is a mess and very slow, badly categorized and generally unusable. Where can I find this .bin file? The only related link I am able to find asks me about my server operating system (what does this have to do with the iLO?!) and lets me download an .iso with no .bin file And also a related question: what is the latest iLO 3 version? (for Proliant DL380 G7, not sure if the iLO is tied to the server model)
Post a Comment
Read more

linux - Awstats - outputting stats for merged Access_logs only producing stats for one server's log

I've been attempting this for two weeks and I've accessed countless number of sites on this issue and it seems there is something I'm not getting here and I'm at a lost. I manged to figure out how to merge logs from two servers together. (Taking care to only merge the matching domains together) The logs from the first server span from 15 Dec 2012 to 8 April 2014 The logs from the second server span from 2 Mar 2014 to 9 April 2014 I was able to successfully merge them using the logresolvemerge.pl script simply enermerating each log and > out_putting_it_to_file Looking at the two logs from each server the format seems exactly the same. The problem I'm having is producing the stats page for the logs. The command I've boiled it down to is /usr/share/awstats/tools/awstats_buildstaticpages.pl -configdir=/home/User/Documents/conf/ -config=example.com awstatsprog=/usr/share/awstats/wwwroot/cgi-bin/awstats.pl dir=/home/User/Documents/parced -month=all -year=all...
Post a Comment
Read more

linux - How can I get my mediawiki to stop thinking I have cookies disabled?

I've searched half a day for how to resolve this issue, and can't figure it out. Shortly after I made my wiki a simple private wiki according to the instructions at Mediawiki's website, it started giving me this weird login error message: Wiki uses cookies to log in users. You have cookies disabled. Please enable them and try again. If I remove those private wiki settings, the error disappears, even if I try logging in. But I need it to be a private wiki for only my team. So what do I do? Here's what I've done so far. Just to be safe, after ever change, I try rebooting Apache using: sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart In my php.ini file, I have the following set: session.save_path = "/var/lib/php5" session.cookie_secure = secure session.cookie_path = /tmp session.cookie_domain = my server's internal URL (should I even set this? this field was blank before, but not commented out) session.referer_check = Off I ran the following to ensure that the fold...
Post a Comment
Read more