I currently work for a company that uses allot of Sitecore servers and has many dev seats across Europe.
A problem that I have run into is that we desperately need a testing environment for Smoke Testing, Automation Tests and other Manual pre QA deployment.
The internal department that deals with licenses says that kind of environment is classed a a full server and requires the full license fee (which has allot of zeros!!)
Because its an enterprise business we are now in a catch 22 situation. I have heard that spinning up a new VM on the machine I am developing on is allowed on a developers license / and I can reusue my developer license on any machine as long as i am the only person that uses it.
So, if our tester sets up his own test machine that only he uses, its covered by his developer license? That thing will be rebuilt several times a week and never have anybody else connect to it really, maybe other developers. (license overlapping?)
Anybody have any similar issues or solution? I need to provide formal proof if I have any chance of pushing this forward. (I contacted sitecore also but it may take a while for them to come back, Just looking too see if anybody else may help in the mean time)
Sitecore 8+ licensing structure has changed and will allow you to create multiples of Virtual Machines using a single license. This can be leveraged for test systems, load balancing, pre-production or quality assurance uses.
IMHO: The only reason they did this was to probably get onto the "cloud" marketing train and realised their 1990's extremely restrictive licensing terms needed to be overhauled as it prevented them selves from using their own software in virtual machines.
So prior to Sitecore 8, No. You have to have a full license for each machine and each machine.
Basically extremely restrictive licensing that cost a fortune, as that is the Sitecore business model.