Hi Guys,
This may well be an old topic, but I'm not sure where to find it. I run a small software development company specialising in embedded systems. I have some very exotic build environments and I want to be able to freeze the environment on a VM, such that regardless of the PC hardware in the future, or the tools support. I have the working environment in the VM archived. I have already created the VM, I have been using it for a while now. My question is how might I share this, or at least offer access to it, whilst still being able to upgrade the VM when required.
My initial thought had been to create the VM baseline, bundle it and ship a copy to the client for safety. This way we both have a copy of the sensitive tools. My plan had been to test this and ship him updated versions periodically to maintain the redundancy protection. This works great, but should the client run up the VM, to test it for example, we run the risk of the OS kicking off as the legal and purchased Win10 environment I have installed for my VM, is of course the one in the duplicate too! So ok, we ship it once... the client applies a new MS key. Solved, we have two copies of the environment for security. The tools all pick their licenses up from dongles and license servers anyway... ship it. However, then I need to make an update to the VM, and I ship him a new copy... so we have to apply his OS code again to the new VM to make the license legal... we are obsoleting the old copy anyway, so I guess this is not an issue, it's still only one VM using the code. However, I could understand if the MS license system got rather perplexed.
This doesn't seem to me like it is the model intended... I know about share servers, in a general sense, but my client is quite literally the other end of the globe. The lag delay would be significant, and we're not really keen to ship/expose data to a remote machine.
Any suggestions guys? Am I missing a nuance of licensing laws?
Cheers
Rob
