Assume that I have an environment that is air gapped from production environments.
If I wanted to license every SQL Server to be a Developer Edition what is the best approach to this?
I am aware that one can download Dev Edition from Visual Studio Dev Essentials after registering with a personal Microsoft account, but are the binaries different to Enterprise Edition (and can be differentiated by a SAM tool), or are you provided with specific Dev key for a installation that looks exactly like Enterprise Edition?
Should you and can you run out a build image that has the same individually registered license key to create multiple instances of Dev Edition in a SQL dev farm?
Or is there a specific Dev Edition corporate license key that is available through VLSC, through EA?
Good SAM tools normally recognise Developer edition. I haven’t had issues with SNOW or Flexera, so I assume other agent-based tools should be able to recognise SQL Developer. It is technically (feature-wise) an equivalent of SQL Enterprise but if you run SELECT @@VERSION, it will report correct edition.
I don’t believe there are corporate SQL Developer license keys. Does it even ask for a key?
Thanks SAMexpert, my assumption was that to download a Dev Edition, you are required to register the download to a personal Microsoft account through Visual Studio Dev Essentials.
The question then arises: if I wanted to centrally build out a Dev Edition SQL cluster, can I use the downloaded installation package to create and distribute unlimited SQL instances anonymously - no association with Microsoft user or license key?