Introduction
BYOL, or “Bring your own License,” is the process of bringing previously purchased on premises licenses to public cloud (AWS/Azure etc.), so as to save existing software license investments.
As organization are moving to cloud, their existing investments would be respected using BYOL leading to better software license optimization (as organization now only need to pay for compute on the cloud).
Figure 1 BYOL concept explanation
Challenges faced in managing BYOL
Figure 2 BYOL challenges faced by organization
A common issue faced by Organizations is related to managing Azure Hybrid Benefit (a BYOL benefit provided by Microsoft Azure). Azure Hybrid Benefit is a licensing benefit that helps you to significantly reduce the costs of running your workloads in the cloud. It works by letting you use your on-premises Software Assurance-enabled Windows Server and SQL Server licenses on Azure.
Customers enable the Azure Hybrid benefit during virtual machine provisioning, without determining if they have adequate on-premises entitlements with software assurance. This presents a huge risk to enterprise, as although at that time Microsoft will not charge the customers for software cost during provisioning.
However, during audit, the publisher will check if the organization has enough entitlements with software assurance to manage the cloud resources provisioned and will thereby determine compliance fine for the organization.
Figure 3 Azure Hybrid Benefit enablement on MS Azure
ServiceNow Software Asset Management support for BYOL
ServiceNow provides the following support for BYOL
Figure 4 ServiceNow support for BYOL
ServiceNow Software Asset Management BYOL Solution Overview
Please find below the high level solution overview for BYOL:
Figure 5 BYOL Solution Overview on ServiceNow
Use Cases
The below diagram provides an overview of the use cases supported on ServiceNow for BYOL. It also helps understand the set of plugins and the ServiceNow release on which the use cases are available.
Customers are advised to review their use cases, and thereby decide on activating features. Notice, SAM Enterprise is beneficial if ServiceNow SAM Pro and Cloud Insights are to be used together.
Figure 6 Use Cases for BYOL on ServiceNow- 1
Figure 7 Use Cases for BYOL on ServiceNow-2
Discovery of cloud resources for BYOL
Video explaining discovery of cloud resources for BYOL:
The following attributes are discovered on the cloud, which are used by ServiceNow SAM for determining correct license compliance
Figure 8 Discovered attributes from the cloud on ServiceNow
As you can see, ServiceNow is able to discover the License type of cloud resources, discover type of IaaS devices (shared/dedicated), discover PaaS resources etc.
Once them cloud resources are discovered, they can be seen on the software installation record, which will help SAM Pro to determine license compliance accurately.
Figure 9 Cloud License Type discovery on ServiceNow
More details on Cloud License type discovery are provided below. For more details refer docs here
Figure 10 Cloud License type discovery on ServiceNow
Figure 11 IaaS dedicated Hosts discovered on ServiceNow
Figure 12 AWS RDS PaaS resources discovered on ServiceNow
The discovered values on the cloud, lead to creation of software installation record as below:
Figure 13 Software Installs Created on ServiceNow SAM with all details
Software License compliance and optimization support on ServiceNow SAM Pro
Video on managing BYOL using ServiceNow SAM Pro:
ServiceNow SAM Pro supports the License compliance for MS Windows Server, Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle DB Server deployed on Azure and AWS
The license compliance rules are different for different products as they are deployed on different cloud providers. For example, pls check the licensing rules for Microsoft Windows Server as in the below diagram.
A brief overview of Microsoft Windows Server Licensing rules on MS Azure and AWS, are as below :
Figure 14 Microsoft Windows Server Licensing rules on AWS and MS Azure
Notice some of the following licensing rules:
1. Microsoft Windows Server Data Center allows for dual use rights, Dual Use Rights allows you to use your Windows Server licenses on Azure and on licensed servers in your data centers at the same time. This is a Azure Hybrid Benefit, and only available on MS Azure, not on AWS or any other cloud provider. More about Dual Use Rights here
2.Similarly, notice the licensing rule for Dedicated Host updated recently on Aug 2019, which states that- Beginning October 1, 2019 "on-premises licenses purchased without Software Assurance and mobility rights cannot be deployed with dedicated hosted cloud services offered by the following public cloud providers: Microsoft, Alibaba, Amazon (including VMware Cloud on AWS), and Google. They will be referred to as 'Listed Providers.”
Hence, BYOL is allowed on Azure Dedicated Host via Azure Hybrid Benefit, but not on AWS dedicated host if purchase is made after 1 Oct 2019.More about this licensing rule here
3.Lastly notice, that for Windows Server BYOL is not allows on AWS shared tenancy hosts, this is
because Windows Server does not have license mobility rights. Hence, even if the organization has software assurance, they will be unable to use their on-premises Windows Server licenses on AWS EC2 instances.
However, they can bring their licenses to Azure VM instances if they have software assurance and Azure Hybrid Benefit configured
To understand the entire set of licensing rules please check here. Notice that licensing rules are different for Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle DB Server on AWS and MS Azure.
ServiceNow Software Asset Management takes care of all these complex licensing rules. It determines the license compliance position accurately for the organization across both on-premises and cloud, by automatically applying the rules in the most optimized manner. Additionally, it applies Azure Hybrid Benefit rights such as Dual Use Rights on Windows Server, Edition flexibility for SQL Server etc.
Lastly, in case of non-compliance, ServiceNow SAM generates remediation actions that generate reclamation candidate workflows for action to become compliant again!
Figure 15 Remediation Action workflow to manage non-compliance
To sum up,
ServiceNow supports
- Discovery of cloud resources and their license types,
- Determination of accurate license compliance for Microsoft Windows Server, SQL Server, Oracle DB Server deployments across hybrid deployments (on-premises + cloud)
- Automatic application of optimization benefits such as Azure Hybrid benefits on Microsoft products deployed on MS Azure
- Creates Remediation workflows to manage non-compliance
Figure 16 ServiceNow Support for BYOL
Reports for BYOL on ServiceNow SAM Pro
The reports related to BYOL available on SAM Pro are mentioned below:
Figure 17 BYOL related reports on ServiceNow SAM
