I was looking at a quarter million for a few dozen machines and 2 AD servers and 4 SQL servers. Nearly on par with the cost of the hardware I was buying. Unti

I was looking at a quarter million for a few dozen machines and 2 AD servers and 4 SQL servers. Nearly on par with the cost of the hardware I was buying. Until some bright spark realized it was all testing/dev/qa for those machines, MSDN suddenly was way better cost wise. If all you are doing is testing/dev then MSDN is usually the choice you want (but grab your lawyer to dig into the terms on that one). But in a real env with no dev work, the licenses become a real pain and very costly, and per year recurring many times, and stack because each service type has time, or sometimes they combine. Not dealing with it at all is very tempting.