Why did you have to mention licencing?
It's probably every Admins least favourite topic.
Licensing is a head ache all round. From reading EULAs to trying to maintain some kind of record of what is installed where, it is a difficult and painful part of our job but it has to be done and done meticulously and with great diligence and it is always a fight to get those further up the food chain to appreciate the cost and restrictions that are imposed.
Trying to get any kind of financial support for some kind of Software Asset Management (SAM) system is both difficult to justify and a difficult sell, where's the return on investment on what can be quite a large investment?
Well you just wait until Microsoft come knocking on your door. If you have any kind of volume licensing agreement you will have signed something to say it's ok for Microsoft to come in at 30 days notice and do an audit of all the software on all your PCs and Servers and Macs. Oh and you will pay for the privilege. In our case that could be somewhere around £150,000. Yes you read that right we pay Microsoft to audit us.
To get around this you need to have some SAM, and a bit of paper that says your records are independently audited as being correct. Now the fee is not the end of it. No MS what their pound of flesh for all the years you haven't been paying them their full whack, they will be expecting to get a similar amount to the fee in fines. Recently an other subsidiary company got hit with a 3,000,000 euro fine. Yes 3 million euros.
Not surprisingly this made everyone jump up and down like the proverbial cats on a hot tin roof in all the other subsidiaries as it is the kind of cost that really causes the big wigs a lot of pain as they see there bonuses go up in smoke and most of their profits for the year.
MS kindly decided to give all the other subsidiaries 3 months to sort themselves out or get audited.
The US arm went in full panic mode and went for the top to bottom revue and restructure of licensing, unfortunately it will probably take too long to prevent an audit.
We are a bit more nimble in the UK and were in a much better position (or so we thought) than them. We have been blessed with someone who took responsibility for all this and had a grasp of 80-90% of what was going on and what we need to be licensed for. Though there are many gotchas we have discovered along the way at least we have the right paperwork and audit trails of our purchases.
The main pain points to avoid problems are:
Every user will need to have a Windows Server CAL as well, if you have 1 2008 R2 server then they all need to be 2008 R2 CALs so get upgrading.
VMware
The elephant in the corner. This is where things get a little tricky and potentially expensive.
General rule of thumb is if you buy standard licences, per processor will apply to virtual processors and you can't vMotion. There are exceptions, Exchange you can though there are some 90 day limitations on a second move to another host. Enterprise you can vMotion and per socket license is on the host and allows for up to for 4 instances on that host. Datacentre is you best friend, it makes your life very easy, this is per socket and allows unlimited copies of the software or OS to run on that host. With Windows the break point is around 4 or 5 guests per socket. I would say that for a painless life it is a no brainer to licence all your VMware or Hyper-v server with a copy of Windows Server Datacentre. You will need to allow for the up grade of your licences when MS release a new version of Server and you need to run it which could be expensive but it does make life very easy. SQL break points are a lot higher though with the potential huge saving on CALs by going for a per processor licence it may be worth licensing a limited number of hosts and carving up your VMware datacentre so all you SQL boxes are restricted to a those hosts. Microsoft will look at al the logs to see if you have been moving servers around.
There is a general rule that you can't move a licence for 90 days (it has been suggested that this might now be 60 days but I have yet to confirm) after you have installed a product, or 90 days after you have moved it to another piece of hardware, this is why you can't vMotion standard software and why you have to buy a PC with an OEM Windows copy and buy addition rights through the Enterprise Agreement if you wish to use imaging and such like to install Windows.
If you have got 5 PCs and a Server I doubt Microsoft will come knocking on your door, if you have 25 to 50 and 2 or 3 it is still unlikely unless you work in a industry that is known to be bad. If you ave over 100 PCs and 10 to 15 servers and have just put a toe in water of virtualisation you should be starting to get worried, if you are at 1000 PCs and 50+ servers you should be thinking more when than if.
If you get to grips with the licensing before they come knocking on your door you will be in a much better position, if you have any users that are Admins of their PC then you should be very afraid.
Licensing is a head ache all round. From reading EULAs to trying to maintain some kind of record of what is installed where, it is a difficult and painful part of our job but it has to be done and done meticulously and with great diligence and it is always a fight to get those further up the food chain to appreciate the cost and restrictions that are imposed.
Trying to get any kind of financial support for some kind of Software Asset Management (SAM) system is both difficult to justify and a difficult sell, where's the return on investment on what can be quite a large investment?
Well you just wait until Microsoft come knocking on your door. If you have any kind of volume licensing agreement you will have signed something to say it's ok for Microsoft to come in at 30 days notice and do an audit of all the software on all your PCs and Servers and Macs. Oh and you will pay for the privilege. In our case that could be somewhere around £150,000. Yes you read that right we pay Microsoft to audit us.
To get around this you need to have some SAM, and a bit of paper that says your records are independently audited as being correct. Now the fee is not the end of it. No MS what their pound of flesh for all the years you haven't been paying them their full whack, they will be expecting to get a similar amount to the fee in fines. Recently an other subsidiary company got hit with a 3,000,000 euro fine. Yes 3 million euros.
Not surprisingly this made everyone jump up and down like the proverbial cats on a hot tin roof in all the other subsidiaries as it is the kind of cost that really causes the big wigs a lot of pain as they see there bonuses go up in smoke and most of their profits for the year.
MS kindly decided to give all the other subsidiaries 3 months to sort themselves out or get audited.
The US arm went in full panic mode and went for the top to bottom revue and restructure of licensing, unfortunately it will probably take too long to prevent an audit.
We are a bit more nimble in the UK and were in a much better position (or so we thought) than them. We have been blessed with someone who took responsibility for all this and had a grasp of 80-90% of what was going on and what we need to be licensed for. Though there are many gotchas we have discovered along the way at least we have the right paperwork and audit trails of our purchases.
The main pain points to avoid problems are:
- Never, ever, ever give anyone admin rights on their PC. One of the most annoying parts of the fine mentioned above must be to pay for licences for games installed by users granted admin rights in order to get badly written software to work. Bad decision to buy the software and sloppy admin not to find a better work around.
- Never buy any software without maintaining an auditable trail of the purchase, you may need to prove you actually bought the software, just having the license key is not enough.
- Read what you are allowed to do with each version, not just the headline stuff like database sizes and connections but visualization rights and whether you count sockets, cores or virtual cores. Upgrade and downgrade rights.
- Client Access Licenses (CALs), they love them, you hate them and they can cost more than the server software. Do the maths, per processor licence or per user licence. External or internal users? This was another big pain point in the above fine.
- External users connecting to your server, check out the external connector licence
- Smart phones, iPhones, iPads, Blackberries connecting to Exchange? Buy the CALs.
- Sounds simple but you really need to install the right version. Bought office 2007 Pro plus? Don't install Office 2007 Enterprise, even uninstalling the components not in Pro Plus is not good enough. Bought a copy of Office but only need Outlook. Don't install the full copy of Outlook, install the Outlook from the version of Office you bought.
- Don't buy boxes from PCWorld or EBAY, buy licences from proper companies that keep better records than you do.
Every user will need to have a Windows Server CAL as well, if you have 1 2008 R2 server then they all need to be 2008 R2 CALs so get upgrading.
VMware
The elephant in the corner. This is where things get a little tricky and potentially expensive.
General rule of thumb is if you buy standard licences, per processor will apply to virtual processors and you can't vMotion. There are exceptions, Exchange you can though there are some 90 day limitations on a second move to another host. Enterprise you can vMotion and per socket license is on the host and allows for up to for 4 instances on that host. Datacentre is you best friend, it makes your life very easy, this is per socket and allows unlimited copies of the software or OS to run on that host. With Windows the break point is around 4 or 5 guests per socket. I would say that for a painless life it is a no brainer to licence all your VMware or Hyper-v server with a copy of Windows Server Datacentre. You will need to allow for the up grade of your licences when MS release a new version of Server and you need to run it which could be expensive but it does make life very easy. SQL break points are a lot higher though with the potential huge saving on CALs by going for a per processor licence it may be worth licensing a limited number of hosts and carving up your VMware datacentre so all you SQL boxes are restricted to a those hosts. Microsoft will look at al the logs to see if you have been moving servers around.
There is a general rule that you can't move a licence for 90 days (it has been suggested that this might now be 60 days but I have yet to confirm) after you have installed a product, or 90 days after you have moved it to another piece of hardware, this is why you can't vMotion standard software and why you have to buy a PC with an OEM Windows copy and buy addition rights through the Enterprise Agreement if you wish to use imaging and such like to install Windows.
If you have got 5 PCs and a Server I doubt Microsoft will come knocking on your door, if you have 25 to 50 and 2 or 3 it is still unlikely unless you work in a industry that is known to be bad. If you ave over 100 PCs and 10 to 15 servers and have just put a toe in water of virtualisation you should be starting to get worried, if you are at 1000 PCs and 50+ servers you should be thinking more when than if.
If you get to grips with the licensing before they come knocking on your door you will be in a much better position, if you have any users that are Admins of their PC then you should be very afraid.
Comments
Post a Comment