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GO Data Centres: Virtual Hosting SL introduction

GO Data Centres: Virtual Hosting SL introduction. Cliff Meece – v1 Feb 2007. Overview and audience. This presents a brief sketch of the state of VMware licensing in BP I will cover: products that exist current state of licensed servers future areas for remediation

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GO Data Centres: Virtual Hosting SL introduction

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  1. GO Data Centres:Virtual Hosting SL introduction Cliff Meece – v1 Feb 2007

  2. Overview and audience • This presents a brief sketch of the state of VMware licensing in BP • I will cover: • products that exist • current state of licensed servers • future areas for remediation • current procurement procedure • License portal • Audience • Some of the slides are tailored to people familiar with LMP, and familiar with the analogous situation regarding Oracle

  3. Overview of estate • Almost all VMware presence is located in EMDC/AMDC • Most are concentrated in large farms (16 server or more) • Most are owned by IST, and have been built and operated to Service Line standards. • accounting of these servers are good and all servers known to the SL are licensed. • Licenses procured under the supervision of the SL are ESX Enterprise Edition with Platinum support. There is no expiration date and a yearly subscription renewal. • All SL known servers are licensed via FlexLM License servers, installed with the Virtual Center management product • The SL has a number of ‘spare’ licenses

  4. Consolidate and reach out • The vast majority of VMware infrastructure is ‘under the service line’ • Represents approximately 2300 virtual servers. • There are islands of VMware around the organization that have had no interaction with the SL regarding licenses • I made no large attempt to identify or corral these rogue installs. Instead I focused on all new deployments coming through the TIP pipeline and on existing efforts by the Segments to consolidate all of their VMware into large farms. • After consolidation, the goal was to identify islands of VMware and migrate their instances into the large existing VMware farms

  5. Product Overview • ESX • ESX is the main product. It is installed on Bare Metal (No underlying OS required). • Virtual Center • Only one VC server per environment is needed, so there are only a handful in the company • VC also is the central store of licenses, and authorizes ESX servers to operate • There are two versions operating, 1.x and 2.x • 1.x are legacy, no more will be installed • 2.x are current and are licensed • Converter • ESX version 2

  6. Sketch of Procurement • Projects work with architecture/SL to size new purchase • SL advises how many licenses needed. • Segment or group procurement person submits request to out current supplier (Computacenter) for the required number of licenses (I’m usually cc’d on all correspondence) • Procurement proceeds in ‘normal’ fashion • each group seems to have slightly different mechanisms here • Result of purchase is an email with a LAC code • I receive the LAC and enter into the license portal • I redeem a license file for each server and deliver it to the relevant operations team for install. • All licenses procured in this way will be trued up at year end

  7. License Portal • All licenses purchased receive a ‘License Activation Code’ (LAC) • code can represent a bundle of dissimilar products • Code cannot be used directly on any server • LAC are tied to BP personnel and an account on the VMware license portal • LAC’s can be entered into the VMware License portal and then a list of authorized products will be added for the account holder • individual (or collections) of product licenses can then be redeemed from the portal • Licenses redeemed are FlexLM license files (text files with hashes inside) • These files are installed on the VC servers to authorize products

  8. Portal cont. • address: https://www.vmware.com/support/licensing.html • username: vmwarelicenceadmin@uk.bp.com • password: ni@itlaz

  9. Portal Cont.

  10. Portal Cont.

  11. Future issues for remediation • Audit of remaining licenses • investigation of streamlined purchasing with Bob North • split support functions from licence portal • true-up coming in early 2009 • audit of the rest of BP using VMware • Some licenses redeemed through the portal are not individual to one server, and need to be split for consistency • No tight relationship between license files and ACTUAL servers. The VC license server simply authorize a number of features, so the maintenance of the relationship between server and license will need do be done with external process • There is an option of generating a ‘host-based’ license, but that is not currently being done, as there are number of large downsides to this approach

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