Q:

Licensing a SQL DR box

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Can you help me with my software licensing question? 

I'm tempted to use a DR server which holds a mirrored copy of a database to also perform test restores and integrity checks of the principle database.
There maybe issues with network bandwidth (copying the backup from the primary server along with the mirrored traffic) and CPU capacity on the secondary DR server (performing redo and running checkdb on Standard edition), besides these, if I do restore and recover the primary database on the seondary DR server, will I have to license the box?
I wouldn't be using this copy of the primary database for anything other than running checkdb (honest guv).   

A:

Express or Developer editions won't do it as you're already using mirroring.
Basically as soon as you use the instance for anything apart from hosting redundant copies of databases through log-shipping or mirroring, you must buy a license.
It's a bit sucky as most people would expect that testing restore sequences and running consistency checks would be ok, but them's the rules!
If you go this route, be careful how you place the databases, in terms of I/O subsystem - the extra I/O load from CHECKDB (usually way more than doing a restore) could make your mirroring REDO queue grow and contribute to a slower failover.
Hope this helps!
PS I had an idea - what you could do is log-ship to the same instance the database that you're interested in - then you will be testing the log backups at least. Technically, restoring using WITH STANDBY and running CHECKDB is against the licensing model too...

