Server Virtualization is a hot topic in the computer press this year and this is not just a concern for large businesses. Smaller organizations with limited staff and floorspace can gain a great return on investment by using these technologies. VMWare has recognized this and offers specific tools for the SMB market.
Mature technologies are available from various hardware and software vendors that provide a greater degree of robustness and allow organizations to maximize their hardware utilization. Processors and operating systems are increasingly savvy about virtualization. Applications vendors are realizing that they must support customers running their software in virtual environments. The primary area where things still lag behind in the nature and complexity of licensing agreements on virtualized or partitioned hardware.
Microsoft recently simplified the license options for virtualized environments for it's server operating systems and software. They offer clear easy to understand rules about what licenses are required in a virtual environment. Their license model allows for subcapacity licensing also clearly realizes the fact that virtual machines may float between physical servers. One of the great deals to come out of this change in mindset about virtual environments is Microsoft 2003 Datacenter Server license "retails" for $2,999 per processor (two processor - socket- minimum) - while this may seem like a costly alternative considering Windows Standard edition lists for $999 - a Datacenter Server license gives the license holder the right to run an unlimited number of Windows 2003 or Windows 2000 virtual server environments on the hardware - whether they will be using Microsoft's virtualization software or VMWare. By purchasing copies of Datacenter Server for the four blades in our VMWare VI3 cluster I never have to worry about to tracking license counts en our VMWare environment. Unfortunately Datacenter Server is positioned for much larger organizations so I had to talk to three software vendors before finding one who would sell it to me since we are a small business.
Other vendors are not quite as clear or are not quite as helpful in their pricing on partitioned or virtual environments. The Oracle Licensing page in the Oracle FAQs WIKI states "As at February 13 2006, Oracle still did not recognize "soft partitioning" technologies such as VMWare and Microsoft Virtual Server when licensing by processor/CPU. Instead you must license by the physical processor in the underlying hardware."
IBM does recognize partitioning and allows subcapacity licensing of products under a Passport agreement but while their sets of documents to explain in detail all the options for a logically partitioned (LPARed) environment the rules are still quite hazy about the VMWare option and which products are offered under subcapacity licensing is also unclear. I would love to have a simple straightforward statement on running Lotus Domino, Sametime and Quickr under a VMWare cluster - do I have to have licenses for each system in the cluster? Can I use subcapacity licensing with VMWare and only license for one socket or core?
With vendors of more specialized products the problem gets even worse. We passed on the purchase of a commercial PGP encryption application to run in an 2 processor logical partition on one of our consolidated AIX systems because the vendor's pricing was prohibitive since they only licensed based on the physical hardware - a 16 processor box.
What about you? Are you using virtualization in your business? Have you run into any licensing nightmares? Which vendors do you think need to get the message most?
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3 comments:
I have been going through several boxing-matches with IBM over their so-called sub-capacity licensing model for Lotus Domino.
Several large customers were handed a large bill after an audit by a licensing company.
One customer had two Domino-servers (two SMTP gateways that work in tandem) running in their VI3 environment.
Each of the Virtual machines had one (1) Virtual CPU.
IBM on the other hand wanted the customer to buy a pr. CPU-license for every CPU-core "available" to the Domino-servers.
I.e. every core in the VI3 cluster which at that moment had 160 cores (10 Hosts with 4*4 cores).
Not surprisingly the customer wasn't too pleased with that logic.
IBM wanted them to pay for two 160-core licenses.
Lets just say that even IBM Norway started to understand how completely unreasonable it was and in the end agreed that one vCPU = 100 points or one pCPU which is the only reasonable thing to conclude with.
Hopefully the whole CPU-licensing model will be gone in a short time.
In Norway You can't get a server with at least one Quad-core CPU. Dual and Single Cores are no longer sold.
So, even the simplest domino-server which could easily have done its job with a single-core CPU will have to be installed on a Server with at least four cores.
The whole point-based licensing model would force the customer to pay for 200 points (each core is 50 points on a multi-core cpu) because there are no longer any single-core servers out there.
This alone will at least double the licensing costs for thos customers moving their Domino-servers from old single-core servers to a new server with one quad-core CPU.
Chuck, I introduced subcapacity licensing for Lotus Domino in Domino 8 and also 7.0.3. I agree that the guidelines published by IBM overall are confusing and vague... it surprises me to learn that VMWare isn't listed as eligible. I can look into that.
@Dag -- a compliance audit requires a customer to be licensed for the then-current licensing terms during the term of their contract. I think that the compliance team understands we have changed the terms at 8.0 / 7.0.3, but they can't undo the fact that the license was total number of physical processors until those releases.
@Ed - Some versions of VMWare products are included - just not VI3 - the latest technology release - which we're running.... and only some Lotus products - Messaging server, Connections and Enterprise server are included but not Sametime or Quickr.
And my main problem with the documents is that they really don't go into much detail on how the licensing is applied with VMWare. There's a half dozen slides on dynamic LPAR subcapacity licensing - and I can understand that it's IBM hardware and software.... we just need a clearer picture for VMWare.
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