Do any of you use test server? If you have a QA server with developer licenses and have a separate productive server, where you can test on low activity times, is the purchase of a test server licenses really necessary?
It depends on what you are trying to achieve; if you want to test new/updated documents within the same version then I would have thought your QA server would be ideal. On the other hand, if you want to do tests to check version upgrade compatibility then thats different.
I wanted to do tests for upgrading from v8 to v9 and the cost of test server was prohibitive; Qliktech wouldnt play ball for a 'temporary' licence. If you install a test server on the same network as the live one using the same LEF then the services will randomly terminate.
Our QlikView environment is validated to support our regulatory reporting requirements. What this means is that we have two independent equivlanent environments with separate license keys: production and quality (which is the QVTest server license). The test server license is helpful because we do want to pay full price for the Quality environment as it's really just used for Release testing before we approve changes into the production environment.
In fact, we really need a third 'Sandbox' environment to install and test the latest QlikView Service Release functionality before we submit the change request to our QA. We experienced a significant amount of problems when we attempted to use the same Publisher license key for both the production and quality environments. Our AccessPoint folder is on a NAS with the PRD/QAS and DEV on the same root folder. The .pgo files became corrupted and it took a long time to identify/resolve this issue.
I would recommend that if you intend to use QlikView as your 'enterprise' BI tool you will eventually need to purchase a second if not third test server license (depending on whether you operate in a validated environment).
We currently use QlikView Publisher and QlikView Server 9.0 SR3. We also use the QVS Cluster (2 nodes)
