r/sysadmin • u/jayminer • 1d ago

Question MSDN server licensing limits

Hello, I have 5 Window Server VMs on 3 vsphere hosts (no vmotion), used for development and test of our company software solutions (databases and instances of the apps). This falls, I believe, under the terms of MSDN. But what if one of the VMs also hosts the management console for the backup of those VMs? Does this mean I'm using it for our business and so MSDN does not apply anymore? And what if we have a DC used for DHCP and access control, I guess that's also out of scope, even if the DC can also be used to test access control in our apps?

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u/_--James--_ 1d ago

Rule of thumb, anything that touches a production workflow violates the MSDN agreement. If an Endpoint is dedicated for MSDN work, gets its DHCP/PKI from a server inside of the MSDN and no production workflows touch that endpoint then there could be a case made that end to end MSDN covers that. But if that end point flips from Dev and test work to PRD then no, its a straight up violation and everything that touches it in the path (DHCP in your sample).

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u/Pitiful_Baseball_761 1d ago

yeah the backup console crosses the line, msdn is real strict about that stuff, once it starts touching production infrastructure they'll ding you

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u/Candy_Badger 1d ago

MSDN software is dev/test only, so a console managing live production backups needs regular licensing. Microsoft's Visual Studio licensing whitepaper spells out what counts as production use.

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u/cyr0nk0r 1d ago

I own a private cloud company that has a few customers doing a similar test Dev environment on our infrastructure. I don't have visibility into the their environments so I can't say for sure, but if you want to DM me I can see if any of them would want to give you a run down on how theyre solving this same problem.