SQL Server Licensing for QA Machines

Question

I'm currently working on some infrastructure costing, and I'm having a bit of trouble finding the best solution for SQL Server licensing for QA servers.

We're developing an ETL solution using SSIS. Our solution doesn't have a database per se, but is utilizing SSIS to run validation and transformation on text files in flight. Because we need testers to be able to test in isolation (i.e. each needs to test on their own server), we want to set up virtual machines with the packages installed to their own SQL Server instances.

The problem I'm running into is that there doesn't seem to be a good licensing solution for this scenario. Devs can use Developer Edition through their MSDN licenses, but for QA it looks like we'll actually need full Enterprise Edition licenses (we're using SSIS functionality not available in Standard).

Is there a SKU I'm missing that addresses this?

Answer 1

AFAIK you can use dev editions for QA as long as it is internal and the DB is not accessed from the internet but only intranet

From the MS site

Developer Edition is designed to enable developers to build any type of application on top of SQL Server 2005. It includes all the functionality of Enterprise Edition (win32, x64, IA64) but with a special development and test license agreement that prohibits production deployment.

What do you mean when you say "we are using SSIS functionality not available in standard edition?"