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