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VMware Licensing Overview and Procurement Guidelines at BP

Gain insights into VMware licensing at BP, covering existing products, servers, procurement processes, and future remediation areas. Understand the licensing portal, audience, and current state of VMware infrastructure.

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VMware Licensing Overview and Procurement Guidelines at BP

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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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