Thank you to everyone that responded.
Based on the responses above, I just wanted to follow up with my own thoughts and my plan of action.
First, my current plan of action...
1) Each developer in our shop will run PB off of a single machine only (either virtual or desktop).
2) Following Paul Horan's suggestion,
> What we did at my company was setup a dedicated physical build machine - not
> a VM, but a physical box using a local unserved license.
we will allocate a single license for a physical box so that each developer, when they need to do a formal build, will walk over to that machine in order to do it.
Second, my thoughts...
This is still one more license than what I thought I would/should need, and it's really unfortunate that we even have to resort to this, but the alternative is worse -- I can't justify virtualizing our build machine if it means purchasing twice as many Powerbuilder licenses (one for each developer that may need to do a build).
The licensing constraints are impacting the way we do our work, which is not a good thing. As a long time Powerbuilder developer and manager (since PB 4.0), I find this trend very discouraging. I understand the concern about unlicensed / pirated products, but I believe there are better ways to handle this (without annoying and driving away existing customers).
Those who know Powerbuilder know of the strengths of the tool/platform. But I agree with other feedback on this thread that if a company makes it increasingly hard for existing customers to get their work done using their tool, the customers will look for alternate tools from other vendors that don't cripple the development infrastructure as much.
Thanks again to everyone for providing very valuable feedback and advice! This was very helpful!