Optimizing License Management for the Data Center
Optimizing data center license management is a key to decreasing application costs, but meeting the challenge requires technology and processes that can deal with heterogeneous, complex license environments that are made all the more complicated by adoption of virtualization.
Mon, October 31, 2011
Network World — This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter's approach.
Optimizing data center license management is a key to decreasing application costs, but meeting the challenge requires technology and processes that can deal with heterogeneous, complex license environments that are made all the more complicated by adoption of virtualization.
In most companies, the data center server infrastructure represents the most diverse computing environment in the organization. A typical enterprise will have an array of operating systems, including Sun Solaris, IBM AIX, HP-UX RedHat Linux, SuSE Linux, Fedora, CentOS, Windows Server and more.
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The only way to effectively manage licensing across this heterogeneous environment is via technology that automatically collects inventory for each physical and virtual server. Once the inventory is collected, it must be processed and normalized to identify hardware and software details and categorize server-based applications.
For software installations, the software asset management tool should be able to report publisher, title, version and edition. To accomplish this, the tool should easily integrate with the diverse set of inventory tools typically used today, including BMC/Tideway, IBM Tivoli and CA.
With the increase in virtualization and complexity of license models (discussed below), this multi-platform inventory automation is really the baseline for license optimization. Leaving any server out of the automated process may make it impossible to get a single, unified view of the current licensing environment and thus make optimization impossible.
Complex license models
License metrics in the data center are becoming increasingly complex. More publishers are moving to capacity-based licensing models, which make it difficult to calculate an accurate license position without automation. Organizations must be able to determine how many licenses are consumed based on the license model and the capacity characteristics of the installed machine (e.g. processors, cores and memory).
As a simple example, an organization must calculate processor-based license consumption based on the number of processors in each (physical or virtual) server to determine whether the appropriate number of licenses have been purchased and allocated in the optimal way.
Some examples of data center/server license models include:
IBM Processor Value Unit (PVU) -- The license position is calculated based on cores, sockets and processor type.
Oracle Named User Plus and Oracle Processor -- Oracle currently uses two license models for its data base software. Oracle Named User Plus is a user based license where named users can access multiple database instances on multiple servers. The Oracle Processor license is based on the type and number of processor cores in the server.
