ComplianceConsole.com

Managing Virtualised Licensing

Virtualisation is increasingly common as businesses look to reduce hardware costs and introduce efficiency savings. Licensing for the virtualised environment however, brings about its own challenges, including the threat of virtualised ‘sprawl’ as it becomes simple to copy a virtual machine and all the applications associated with it.

ComplianceConsole allows virtual systems to be linked to physical hosts, so that the hierarchy can be established and tracked. Many vendors have different licensing rules between physical machines and virtual machines and Concorde’s experience of the licensing around products such as Microsoft Virtual Server, VMware, Plate-Spin and Parallels has helped organisations accurately establish and maintain the licence positions for applications supported on virtual operating systems.

Examples of licensing rules for Microsoft Virtual Server & VMWare.

ComplianceConsole records the relationship between the physical and virtual operating systems and the rules engine / alerts validate the core licensing requirements. Data Centre Edition’s extensive library also ensures you have all the latest licensing information at your fingertips and Concorde expertise is available to further assist if required.

Understanding the licensing requirements linked to the applications on each virtual server can also appear confusing. Oracle and IBM will recognise hardware partitioning of virtual servers, for licensing purposes, but not software partitioning. Concorde’s experience is on-hand to advise on the best approaches, and ComplianceConsole’s information library is available as an easy use reference for scenarios likely to be encountered.