MS license questions

Hi all,
I've just finished installing MS sbs2003 fro a client. They are now thinking about getting duplicate hardware for disaster recovery. I know that every version of MS server software need a license. Do they have to buy another copy of MS sbs? Is there a discount for backup software?

I've been all over MS and read the faq's but the only thing i can find is that every instance needs to be licensed.

Therse servers will never be used at the same time. Its just for protection.

looking ofr a little guidance in the maze that is MS support. Hopefully some of you have been through this and can offer some guidance.

thanks!

The only senario that you wouldn't need it is if the copy of SBS was retail and it was only loaded on one machine. This is a very poor disaster recover model.

Thanks. thats pretty much what I thought going through the MS site.

As for disaster recovery this was there plan under the old consultant that they wanted to institute. When i'm finished they will have the following in place.

1) Main HD will be mirriored.
2) Acronis will be used to make disk images of c: and data storage drives. A rotation is used to keep 3 days worth of images online at all times. Since acronis lets you mount any image as a harddrive this should make recovery of files easy.
3) everynight the system will be dumped to tape. There will be 3 1week rotations of tapes with the previous weeks tapes in a secure offsite location (thinking iron mountain)

I'm also thinking of a secure online facility. I've not used this before but it looks like it could be interesting. i could keep a copy of the latest image of the server and re-create it as needed.

I'm going to try to re-create the current hardware as closely as possible so an image could be restored to the backup system without errors.


I've not thought about online replication in a windows environment. I'm mostly a unix guy and I'm not that familiar with what windows has to offer. I'm going to start looking into this. Since they have to buy another copy of the software it might make sense.

You might actually be better doing a secure online facility. As time goes by, they are getting much better, and could save you a world of problems. Virtual world is improving by leaps and bounds.