- VMWARE VCENTER LICENSING HOW TO
- VMWARE VCENTER LICENSING MANUAL
- VMWARE VCENTER LICENSING UPGRADE
- VMWARE VCENTER LICENSING FULL
VMWARE VCENTER LICENSING UPGRADE
This was not in data center upgrade strategy, and most certainly not in the budget.
VMWARE VCENTER LICENSING FULL
Panic quickly ran through the customer organization ranks: they worried that they needed to true-up to the full 2,000 CPU sockets and effectively double their ELA size. In total, they had deployed and were actively using 2000 CPU sockets with only 1000 CPU sockets under licenses. In the end, we found that the primary campus had almost 900 physical CPU sockets of vSphere deployed the secondary campus was approaching 600 and the third campus had also spiked to 500 CPUs. Instead, these systems were used for non-critical work like development, file/print, and desktop pools. Each regional office started the process of migrating old hardware from vSphere 4 to vSphere 5 and adding new hardware however, they never took their old hardware out of production. The problem was that the top level key entitled 1000 CPUs of vSphere 5 Enterprise. How could this happen? A single top-level vSphere Enterprise Plus key was extracted and registered into each of the regional vCenters. After three months of effort, we had a reply back that the organization had significant over-deployment of licenses-to the tune of over 100%!
VMWARE VCENTER LICENSING MANUAL
We started the manual process of extracting all the licenses from the vCenter and looking up their entitlement, upgrade, and split history in the VMware portal with the help of the VMware License Management Team.
The My.Vmware.Com portal was of little use, since it did not take into account the older vSphere 4 licenses that were supposed to have been upgraded and the license splits across territories. Since licenses were split, upgraded, and deployed against three campuses, the effort to report on all the licenses and their true entitlement was a daunting manual task. However, before they jump, they want to obtain their license summary details to determine if they need additional licenses. In concept, this was all great!įast-forward one year, when the organization decides that Enterprise Plus should have been their strategic direction, so they want to add an addendum to the ELA replacing all of the vSphere Enterprise Editions with Enterprise Plus. This shiny new environment would be split with 500 CPUs in the main campus, 300 in the second campus, and 200 in the third campus. During the ELA renewal, the decision was made to replace old hosts with new hardware, so 250 CPUs of new server hardware was purchased and deployed across their three main campuses. The environment previously had 800 CPUs of vSphere 4 Enterprise and had made the jump to vSphere 5 Enterprise. The end result was considerable over-deployment of license entitlement.Īn organization buys 1000 CPU licenses of vSphere 5 in a new ELA that consolidates all of their existing vSphere 4 license and support into a single managed key. Lastly, upgrading one’s keys to a new version would often mean the old versions of keys were still in production while the new keys were also being deployed. To add insult to injury, vSphere admins could apply the same key to multiple locations with unique vCenters and use more than their entitlement.
This often resulted in the same keys being misused or used multiple time within the organization. To make things even more problematic, users could log into the VMware portal and split licenses into multiple licenses to be applied in different vCenters. The two processes were completely disjointed.
VMWARE VCENTER LICENSING HOW TO
In the annual review process, it quickly came apparent that vSphere admins had no idea how to manage, or even account for their own license usage using the VMware Portal or managing licenses through multiple vCenters. We often engaged our strategic customers to review their license usage prior to their renewing an Enterprise License Agreement (ELA).
This is a story on vSphere License Management within vCenter and the chaos that admins endure on a daily basis.Ī number of years ago, I worked as a Pre-Sales Sr.
The pitfalls of treating vSphere Licensing as an “All You Can Eat Buffet.”