See if this interaction with a MS rep from a few years ago helps at all. We are a volume license customer so I don't know how much of this you can apply to your scenario. She mentions having attached a volume license brief. If you need that I can send it.
You can see my back-and-forth with her in different colors. 1. If we have a real DR scenario and need to restore to an alternate server, it seems to me that this should be considered a transfer of a Windows Server OS license, as opposed to a second license usage. I need to confirm this. The Microsoft Product Use Rights is the definite resource. Put simply, every running instance of the server that your company has, whether on a physical or virtual server, must be licensed. From the January 2010 Product Use Rights, page 33: I) You must acquire either a server license or processor licenses depending on the product you are using. a) Server Licenses: You have the rights below for each software license you acquire. i) Assigning the License to the Server. * Before you run any instance of the server software under a software license, you must assign that license to one of your servers. That server is the licensed server for that particular license. You may assign other software licenses to the same server, but you may not assign the same license to more than one server. A hardware partition or blade is considered to be a separate server. * You may reassign a software license, but not on a short-term basis (i.e., not within 90 days of the last assignment). You may reassign a software license sooner if you retire the licensed server due to permanent hardware failure. If you reassign a license, the server to which you reassign the license becomes the new licensed server for that license. Since the scenario I mention here is a real disaster recovery one, it sounds from this like we should be covered, since it mentions "permanent hardware failure". Whether or not the original server is ever recovered is an unknown. In any case, because it's a DR scenario there would be no reason to run the original server as well as the one that replaces it concurrently. IF you're server is licensed with Software Assurance (SA), Cold back-up would be covered. I've attached a Volume Licensing Brief for reference. If the server is not covered with SA, the cold back-up would still require a license. ii) Running Instances of the Server Software. For each software license you assign, you may run, at any one time, one instance of the server software in one physical or virtual operating system environment on the licensed server. 2. When we clone one of our own servers to the test network for practice, again we are using VL media. This is a temporary test situation, and I assume that we do not need to use a license for those. I need to confirm this as well. You mention that you have MSDN, either MSDN or if you have evaluation rights as part of your Volume License Agreement should cover you. Thanks, that sounds right. The evaluation rights of our VL agreement would be the way to go.
