at our company we have a data warehouse based on SQL Server 2008 R2 EE and some applications developed with Visual Studio 2013. For an upcoming rewrite of the data warehouse I would like to rebuild it using the SQL Server 2012 EE as foundation.
We have 5 developers with MSDN subscriptions and 5 sales guys, who use the actual data warehouse for decision making, equipped with SQL Server 2012 Developer Edition CALs to test the new build of the data warehouse.
So far so good...
My plan was to install the SQL Server 2012 developer edition within our companies network in a virtualized environment. We have a VMWare ESX farm where the sysops gave me two virtual machines, one for test and one for demonstration purposes. Due to the nature of the ESX farm it is possible that the currently active data warehouse and the new 2012 based data warehouse are on the same physical vm host.
Our software license gurus say, that the virtual machines with sql server 2012 developer edition needs to be on a separate physical machine. Is this right?
If so, that would mean, that we would need to buy additional hardware, just for the migration to SQL Server 2012. I can't belief this.
Another problem is the licensing term of being connected to a production system. The nature of the data warehouse is data, that is always coming from some kind of production databases (in our case oracle databases). Is it right, that we can't have "production data" in the new development data warehouse?
I hope you can clear my headaches a little bit. :-)
"Customers cannot use the software in a production environment and any test data that was used for design, development or test purposes must be removed prior to deploying the software for production use."-Licensing Guide
I would say you can use old production data as test data, that is how I have normally seen this done. You certainty have any production processes hitting your data warehouse dev environment because you will be running afoul of the licensing agreement. I would not do something like a daily backup because I think that would be close to crossing the line on the license.
They do not have to be on separate physical machines. They can be on the same physical machine with many VMs. I have never experienced that or have seen that in a MS licensing agreement. I attached the MS Sql Server 2012 Licensing guide and it makes no mention of this.
download.microsoft.com/download/7/3/C/73CAD4E0-D0B5-4BE5-AB49-D5B886A5AE00/SQL_Server_2012_Licensing_Reference_Guide.pdf.