Microsoft Hyper-V development licencing question

  • Hi,

    Apologies if this has been asked before (I've had a search in the forums and cannot find a topic relating to this).

    I am looking to start working with virtual machines on our development workstations, they will be used for day to day development and possibly for checking upgrade issues from 2005 to 2008 R2.

    My question is what are the licencing rules relating to installing windows and SQL Server on the virtual machines? I don't want to push this as a solution only to find out the cost of providing it would be too great.

    Also any tips from anyone already working this way would be greatly appreciated 🙂

  • Not trying to be rude, but have you tried Google?



    Ole Kristian Velstadbråten Bangås - Virinco - Facebook - Twitter

    Concatenating Row Values in Transact-SQL[/url]

  • Hi Ole, Thanks for responding

    Don't worry, that's normally the first thing I tell everyone 😉 I have searched under several combinations but mainly seem to find sharepoint advice. Amusingly I searched for "licensing hyper v on development workstation" and this thread was the tenth search result in Google .. Those guys move fast..

    The reason I posted here was to see if anyoine else has gone down this route and could provide advice, I read http://www.brentozar.com but that seems to mainly cover live virtual environments.

    I'll keep plugging away and post anything I find back to this thread.

  • Are you going down the route of each developer will have their own machine which have Hyper-V with a load of VM's SQL Visual Studio etc, or will it be one Hyper-V server with VMs SQL Visual Studio etc for 100 developers?

    If its the first then if each developer has an MSDN licence issued from your company then as long as you use the software in a development environment and use software downloaded from MSDN only then there isnt any costs.

    Be aware that MSDN Ultimate per user is around £5000 (last time I purchased one) so could get very costly.

    If its the latter with only one Hyper-V box then from what I understand, if the Hyper-V server is assigned to a user and that user has a MSDN licence then your good as well. In terms of assigning it doenst mean that the person has to look after it etc, just that the server is linked to MSDN licence which is linked to a user.

    If the cost of all this is too great, look at purchasing the individual components, Windows Server Data Center for unlimited VM's, SQL Developer edition, Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate and any other software needed and see which is going to be the cheaper option.

    Not touched licensing for a few months so things may have changed

  • Thanks for the detailed reply Anthony, I love the tech side of my job but hate trying to work out licensing..

  • Yeah it is a pain to get your head around, I had to do a full VMware ESX and SQL compliance project at the old place as they where very under licenced and had a MS audit in the pipeline so managed to gain a lot of info on that and MSDN. Wasn't pretty when the board got told they needed to pay in excess of £1mil to become compliant across all MS technologies.

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