[windows software] System Center and MSDN

[jamesb]

I'm giving myself a headache staring at license requirements and wondered if someone might have a nice, easy answer for me.

 

My new job involves a complete revamp of the development platform, and the development network (currently all on the same hardware but that's about to change). As part of it I'd like to deploy System Center to manage both production servers, and development servers.

 

Obviously it's fallen onto me to minimise license costs and this is where the headache starts.

 

I'm planning to separate the current virtualisation cluster into two, one to run nothing but production VMs and the other to host all of the development labs. Since the dev labs are built and destroyed on demand, and are for development only, MSDN should cover them as far as I can tell. What I'd really like to know is how System Center interacts with MSDN licenses - i.e. if the hosts which the test labs sit on are purely for development purposes do I need a server management license for the underlying host or is this covered under MSDN?

 

This makes quite a significant change to the bottom line, and if I need a management license for all of the processors being managed I'm going to need to revisit my design.

[localzuk]

System Center doesn't actually have license codes or the like for clients - it is simply a case of having the right licenses on file somewhere to prove you're legal.

 

So, if MSDN would cover licenses for managing servers, then you're covered for those dev servers. For the production servers, you'll need to buy proper server ML licenses for them.

 

Bear in mind, if you host a bunch of VMs and want to manage them all using System Center, you'll probably be better off with a System Center Datacenter ML license (1 per 2 CPUs) for those hosts for production stuff.

[jamesb]

Excellent. Thank you.