Licensing entire VM Cluster for products only on some hosts

[dimitrisala]

Hi,

We have a number of products that require an entire VM cluster to be licensed irrespective of whether it is deployed across all physical hosts. i.e all physical hosts within that cluster must be licensed even if that cluster only has the software running on VM's on some of the physical hosts.

E.g For RedHat Enterprise Linux, we have a Cluster with 6 ESX Servers, each running multiple VM's. Only 5 of the 6 ESX Servers have VM's with the licensable software. Currently SNOW is only including the 5 ESX Servers when calculating licensing for the cluster where we need it to license all 6.

Given this is quite a common requirement for Virtual Licenses, is there any configuration to ensure all Servers/Hosts within a cluster are licensed?

[dreinhardt]

Hi @dimitrisala,

I would have expected IBM's Publisher Pack for RHEL to take this into account. Red Hat Enterprise Linux core-based licensing. ServiceNow discovery is also able to detect used "affinity rules" and will include this into the license calculation to include/exclude hosts.

Otherwise, I only see two possibilities: either you allocate all hosts or the entire cluster so that it is always licensed, or you contact support with your use case and have the current logic related to RHEL licensing confirmed.

Best, Dennis