Dotnetpanel Forums

Hi Guys and Gurus,

I have had a dialog with my MS rep, concerning our SPLA licensing, and we are a little confused about this.
We are playing a little with a setup using Active dirrectory and we configured DNP to communicate with AD.
We are using windows 2003 64 bit standard.   All are running services accessible from web, exept the Standard SQL server which is local.

UserGroups /Users are created :  

1. DNP_FTP_USERS_HOSTNAME for each host
• FTPUSER_NAME_ftp  for each FTP user the  Client creates
  
  
2. DNP_WEB_USERS_HOSTNAME for each host
• Domain_user_web for each website created

Our MS consultant feels that this is a lot of  USER SPLA licenses we would have to report each mont ?

Alternatively we could use pr PROCESSOR licence, but this is quite expensive when having 10 or more servers running.  and paying U$ 220 pr server

Somebody else said that we shuld be paying a much more less amount and we did not have to report spla for each AD user. He said that we shuld be payng ca 30 U$ pr  Unauthenticated server for all accessible servers and Authenticated + SQL standard for SQL server.

Feeling a little confused, please advice how you do this..

I could be wrong but I dontthink you need SPLA to ffer web hosting. SPLA is more designed if you are reslleing web hosted services like sharepoint, and things like that.

Web hosting in general does not require user licenses as everything is accessed anonymously. Do you do any hosting other than regular webhosting?

Jerel

You are incorrect an SPLA agreement is required to provide any hosted commerical service to an outside customer.  Web hosting is a hosted service.

 http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/programs/spla/default.mspx#E2C

"Other Microsoft Volume Licensing programs—such as Enterprise Agreement, Select License, and Open License—do not allow commercial hosting of Microsoft licensed products. In contrast, the SPLA is designed specifically for services providers so that you can deliver software services to your customers, or even to third parties. As a result, your customers do not have to acquire their own licensed products."

Wow learn something new today. I would wager that 75% of all companies are not licensed propperly. No company I have ever worked for has every had these licenses. We just buy the OS with the server, nothing special there. I guess my business is not licensed correctly then and neither is any I have ever worked for.

Jerel

we are still  hanging in the air here,   we found this though

http://forums.webhostautomation.com/showthread.php?t=23775

I had a chat with MSN Rubal[@]Rubal.Net just before, and he informed me the following.

Users created by DNP in AD are 

• FTP user 
• WEB anonymous  user

and these types of users do not count in SPLA,  so we can create as many as we like and not get punked for them. 
What a relief, we can stay in 20$ instead of 200$ range pr server.

:)