Server Licenscing & Cloud Computing
Deployment of Cloud Server When setting up a Testing environment on a Cloud Server, and having the local server running in production mode; How do we overcome the issue of licensing activation on the TEST server? Testing is expected to last more than 3 days and we wouldn't want to disturb the current production machine. Do you know if there are some kind of temporary server licenses available? That'll be very handy. or any other solutions you could advise, all very welcome. I work 3 days at ILC, Monday, Wednesday & Friday. My contact number is 02-9890 0962 regards, Goretti
Reply by Patrick from Community How on Friday, 2 March, 2012 - 07:37
Goretti, licensing for what? Your Cloud provider should be managing the licensing of the operating system for you. Patrick
Reply by Colin Thompson from TechBrain on Friday, 2 March, 2012 - 13:37
Hi Goretti. I'll assume you are talking about a hosted virtual machine or just hosted rack space somewhere. In which case, the answer is that you can't. Technically Microsoft expect you to but another license for this. If you try to use the same keys again, there is a risk your production license will deactivate. If you are building the virtual test environment from scratch, then you can simply NOT activate the microsoft software for 30 days (or 120 days for Windows 2008 server as per http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd981009.aspx) and in fact, up to 240 days using REARM (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/948472)....which should give you enough time to conduct testing before having to pull the environment down again.