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My question is similar to this one, but I am gearing mine more toward which edition to use.

In the past places I've worked, these decisions were made by other teams, and now I'm being asked to advise.

  1. Edition: Do most sites consider it satisfactory to have a Developer edition running in DEV, QA, and STAGE environments, and then only run Enterprise Edition in Production? I'm specifically referring to server products such as BizTalk (2010/2013) and SQL Server (2008/R2 and 2012).

    In other words, if some software runs on Developer Edition, does Microsoft guarantee it will run on Enterprise. I realize of course that 99.9% of the time it will, but is it a safe and best practice?

  2. Licensing: The developer edition is significantly lower priced; I think Premium MSDN includes the rights to run the Enterprise edition non-Prod environments. If QA accesses a file on a QA server, which license do they need?

  3. Clustering: Further, we run clustered environment in production. I've rarely been anywhere that we have clustering in QA or even STAGE.

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NealWalters
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  • Please see line one of my question: My question is more about "which edition" to use. Suppose I have all licenses I need, but still want to be cost effective and follow best-practices. Maybe #2 in my question is duplicate, but not #1 and #3. – NealWalters Feb 06 '14 at 21:51
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    **(1)** Depends. Primarily opinion based and variable. **(2)** Sorry, we cannot help you with your software licensing question. It's Microsoft licensing, so there's a decent chance that even Microsoft will be unable to help you with your software licensing question. **(3)** Clustering. Yes, this is thing. What of it? I've been in environments where both Dev and QA had many clustered systems, and I've also been in environments that hadn't ever heard of clustering. Or test environment. (That was a rough one). So, much like #1, "Depends. Primarily opinion based and variable." – HopelessN00b Feb 06 '14 at 21:55
  • Meaning, maybe you ought to split your 3 questions into... 3 questions, but since all three questions are off-topic and likely to be closed, that might be a waste of effort on your part. – HopelessN00b Feb 06 '14 at 21:56

1 Answers1

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Edition: Do most sites consider it satisfactory to have a Developer edition running in DEV, QA, and STAGE environments, and then only run Enterprise Edition in Production? I'm specifically referring to server products such as BizTalk (2010/2013) and SQL Server (2008/R2 and 2012).

In other words, if some software runs on Developer Edition, does Microsoft guarantee it will run on Enterprise. I realize of course that 99.9% of the time it will, but is it a safe and best practice?

I don't think Microsoft will guarantee ANYTHING will work, ANYWHERE. The can offer guidance and best practices, and in this case the Developer Edition does have a few differences from Enterprise. The full details for the 2010 version are here: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/6987.biztalk-server-2010-pricing-and-licensing.aspx but you probably already know what they are.

Yes, most sites will run Developer edition in Dev, QA, Stage...just as MS says in the prior link.

"Many customers who deploy BizTalk Server implement separate development, testing, and production environments for their BizTalk Server 2010 solution. For the development and testing environments, you can use the free download of the BizTalk Server Developer Edition."

Licensing: The developer edition is significantly lower priced; I think Premium MSDN includes the rights to run the Enterprise edition non-Prod environments. If QA accesses a file on a QA server, which license do they need?

This isn't something that SHOULD be answered here. It could be, but it isn't smart to give licensing answers on SF and is OT regardless.

Clustering: Further, we run clustered environment in production. I've rarely been anywhere that we have clustering in QA or even STAGE.

Are you asking if you should deploy a cluster in QA or STAGE? It's not a requirement...the cluster is for HA not for the functionality of the app itself but for uptime reasons.

TheCleaner
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  • My coworker fears that if you don't test it on a cluster, it might not work on a cluster. The deploy to a cluster is somewhat different as well. I'm not quite as concerned. – NealWalters Feb 07 '14 at 14:48