In our multi-engine 24x7 corporation, we have to document all planned changes so that they can be scheduled within very tight windows. When upgrading from one level to another, applying a service pack, deciding whether or not we need a product also applied to, say, additional web servers are questions that have to be fully documented including screen shots and back-out plans before permission is granted for the change to be scheduled.
We have been working with evaluation copies of the products to attempt to experiment and to document potential changes, but there are serious limitations with this route. The product is not the same. Licensing screens are different. Not all of the additional products are available as evaluation downloads, such as those for scalability. I suppose I could ask for temporary licenses for all the products that I need to test, but this would be a very tedious process. It would be a temporary solution and so would need to be regularly re-licensed or re-built to replicate our environment.
There has to be a better way for large installations to support these test and development functions and I’ve got a suggestion. These issues only arise in large installations and probably most of these would be using unlimited versions of the suite. It could make sense to offer a free and fully licensed copy of each purchased SLX/ALX product in its smallest variant for use within the company. This would be an ideal platform for test, development and training, but would be far too small to be of live monitoring use to the company.
What do you think?
