VMWare is known for a broad range of products to support Hyperconverged Infrastructure, Cloud Management Products, Cloud Security Products and many more.
VMware Products have various licensing models, which are documented here
https://www.vmware.com/in/support/support-resources/licensing/product-licenses.html
In this blog, we will explain the license compliance support for two of the most popular VMware products:. vSphere and vCenter server.
Before we go further let’s review these two products and their overall functional architecture. Customers usually configure vSphere environment as depicted below, where VMware Hypervisor (also known as ESXi) is installed on physical machines and have virtual machines running them. To manage the vSphere environment, the customer usually installs a vCenter Server on one of the virtual machines, which provides control to manage the entire virtualized infrastructure.
To manage the environment, VMware provides web enabled GUI console (also known as vSphere client). The client is used by VMware administrators to manage and administer vSphere environment including configuring vMotion, license management, and other critical configurations.
Support on ServiceNow
Discovery
ServiceNow Discovery is able to discover all required components and attributes related to vSphere environments. This includes clusters, ESX servers, virtual machines, license key information and many other attributes. This information is crucial not only for VMware licensing but also for the licensing of products from other publishers like Microsoft, Oracle which are deployed on VMware infrastructure.
To understand the discovered attributes in more details. Please refer to our documentation site.
The below diagram, provides a high level overview of the respective tables on ServiceNow CMDB, holding the information.
To troubleshoot Discovery issues, please refer this these two KB articles: KB article1 and KB article2
License Compliance
Once, the required VMware attributes are discovered, ServiceNow Software Asset Management is able to determine the license compliance of VMware products including but not limited to vSphere and vCenter.
The following license metrics support compliance reporting for both vSphere and vCenter:
- vSphere: per processor
- vCenter Server: per app
To understand the different licensing models of VMware supported on ServiceNow, please refer to our documentation site. In addition to understand the VMware License agreements supported , please refer to our documentation site.
Recently, VMware Introduced a new licensing rule that states 1 CPU (or processor) license can cover up to 32 cores. If the CPU has more cores per CPU, licenses will be required. More details on this Licensing rule are covered here.
ServiceNow SAM supports this new licensing rule and provides a license compliance position to customers for their VMware Products.
SAM manager scan view the license compliance results on the SAM workspace and thereby take remediation actions if non-compliant.
As one can see from the below diagram, that for vSphere Enterprise the organization is non compliant and remediation actions for the same are generated.
Figure 3 Software Asset Workspace License Workbench
If the SAM Manager needs to understand how license consumption is happening, they can drill down into license required view, and determine which ESX machines are consuming licenses, and whether they are licensed or not licensed.
Even further details on the licensing model, the license consumption details that provide details for the processor and cores on the ESX server can be easily determined, as well as the software installs contributing in providing an effective license compliance position can be viewed by the SAM manager.
This provides good context to the SAM manager to understand how the VMware licenses were used, and thereby provide remediation action to take actions through workflow, to again become compliant.
