I got following information from support for my ticket in June 2022 (after 2 years)

I have gotten information from our developers that they have rejected the problem report and instead raised it as an enhancement:

From developers:

"I will change the status of this ticket to Rejected as it’s not an actual bug but rather an enhancement.

An enhancement ticket was created for the Enhancements backlog.

Until it will be prioritized in our roadmap, there is no ETA that we could give on it."

Snow's idea was to improve SIM vSphere connector, so that connector would read and send the VMware rules that fix VM's to a host. But I do not have any idea when this will happen.

I finally gave up and closed the ticket. So I do live with a workaround since 2 years and presumably for further years.

Thanks for your response, @Carola Iberl​ :) However, while waiting for Snow, got few questions re this setup:

1. Do you count license required only for the ringfenced hosts - where the VMs can actually run?
2. Does Microsoft allow this?
3. How do you validate if the config of the affinity rules is correct? Appreciate if you could share any Microsoft official doc.

Appreciate the inputs :)

What does the following SLM report show for your hosts running exclusively Linux VMs?

• Windows Server Assessment - 2019 licensing

If I understand the report well, it should list in details the number of Windows VMs and non-Windows VMs running on each host

That will tell you if Snow detected something that requires a license

Hi,

You do have the same problem like we do have.

When you do have a cluster where DRS is activated and you do have some less Windows servers within that cluster, SLM compliance engine will calculate a Windows Server license requirement for all hosts in that cluster. In principle that would be ok, because DRS can move the VM to any host.

But we also created some affinity rules in Vcenter that allows the less Windows VM's to run only on less hosts.

SLM just do not consider any affinity rules.

So my plan was to create some compliance exclusions to exclude that Esx host from Windows Server license requirement.

Unfortunately that compliance exclusions also do not work, (compliance exclusiond do only work for installed software on the computer, and there is no Windows Srever installation on an ESX host). I opened a ticket for this at Snow support 04452049 in September 2020. There is still no update for that.

As workaround we created some licenses, made some comments and assigned that licenses to the ESX hosts, that do not require Windows Server licenses in our opinion. So they do not appear as incompliant any more.

Hi,

as mentioned above, this actually depends more on vmotion than DRS, but at the end of the day this doesn't matter. 😊

What I sometimes advice is quiet the opposite as @Carola Iberl​ described: Assign the existing Windows Server licenses to the ESX hosts rather the datacenter. In this case, if you accidentially move a VM to one of the "Non-Windows-Hosts" this will be shown as unlicensed. and you can deal with it.

But as usual, this might not be appropriate in all environemnts, depending on the number of hosts and the number of Linux-only machines.

Regards,

Axel

Hi @Axel Lamparth​ 

In my explanation above I mentioned how Snow do calculate the Windows Srever license requirement. I do not say that this is completely correct.

I understood in Gustavos question they do have a cluster with several hosts and have only less hosts hosting Windows Servers, fixed to some dedicated hosts in that cluster.

We also do have a DRS cluster with 16 ESX hosts, mostly for Linux servers. But there are also 4 Windows Servers in that cluster, with VMware affinity rules that fixes these 4 Windows servers to only 2 ESX hosts. But SLM do calculate the Windows Server license requirement for all 16 hosts, based on DRS and HA in that cluster (collected by vSphere connector in SIM). This is how SLM do calculate the license requirement (mostly correct, but not completely correct).

Unfortunately there is no possibility for us to tell SLM, for this cluster it should not consider HA and DRS for Windows Server requirement calculation.

We assigned Windows Server licenses to that both hosts and license tracking report showed these both hosts are covered, but also showed underlicensing for the other 14 hosts.

That was the reason, why I discussed this with Snow.

But you are right, the solutions I mentioned above (compliance exclusion or assigning "dummy" licenses) both do have a risk. When Windows Servers would appear on one of that other 14 hosts, I would not notice, that we are underlicensed.

So the current possibilities in SLM are

1. Compliance report do always show underlicensing for 14 hosts
2. having the risk of being underlicensed.

I discussed this with Snow and they agreed. But no solution yet.

Hi @Carola Iberl​,

thank you for your explanation.

I certainly didn't want to critisize your approach, as I am absolutely sure you know what you do in your Snow environment 😊

At the end of the day, it depends on each user's priorities and what works best in the individual situation.

As you said, you can only choose the lesser of thwo evils.

Snow has no solution for this. Not sure if this can be solved at all (for all or at least the majority of users).

Kind regards,

Axel