There are some scenarios where a SRM licensing is required when the customer wants to protect only a small percentage of the VM. In the per CPU licensing model, the customer has to get all the CPUs licensed in one batch even if he only wants to protect 10% of the VM. This was the biggest dilemma of VMware licensing that even if the customer wanted to secure a small amount of his computers, still he was required to get all the computers licensed. The scenario is a bit changed now and for the good of the customers, VMware has announced per VM licensing will be available for the customers from September 1, 2010. Customers will now be allowed to license SRM on a Per VM basis. The old method of licensing, i.e. the per CPU model licensing, will only be valid till December 15, 2010. After this only per VM licensing model will be implemented.
Licensing vSphere 4.1
When it comes to licensing vSphere 4.1, there are a few things that you must know in regard to licensing. vSphere 4.1 allows for DRS affinity and with this the VMs can only move between some certain hosts of a specific cluster. This thing is yet to be definitely answered by the VMware authorities but the authorities should allow the customers to protect some of the VMs and set their DRS affinity only to the host that you own SRM CPUs for and still keep the full cluster no matter if there are some unprotected VMs. In the past, VMware only recommended its users to create separate clusters for its protected and unprotected VMs. This was done so the protected VMs in a protected cluster move only between a specific subset of a cluster. Though this isn’t the final ruling from VMware but still it is being thought that this would work well in short terms for those who are suffering from the per CPU dilemma.
Feature of per VM licensing
Another feature of per VM licensing that is being liked by most of the IT professionals is the rolling average of VMs over the last twelve months. This means that a user needs to buy what the daily average of VMs protected would be over a time period of 12 months. If a user has some certain points of year where the VM count spikes, the average will be monitored by the vCenter and the user would be notified by some means if he is going over the licensing limits. However, a user would only need an average quantity of protected VMs over the past years. The system would continue to run even if you have gone more than your licensing limits but as IT personals suggest this is not a very good option to undertake.
Per VM licensing is sold in blocks of 25 and the price for licensing ranges anywhere from $1,250 up to $11,250. The price of license is varied depending on the product being licensed. Per VM licensing will be available for Chargeback, AppSpeed, and SRM. For CapacityIQ it will be available late in this year.
