Overall, this is a pretty complex question.

Just to scratch at the surface:

• Unassigned core licenses are not included into the compliance calculation
• Did you meet the minimum requirements for core assignments?
• As you use Datacenter edition: Did you assign the licenses to a host or virtual guest machines?
• If you assigned licenses to a host computer: did you set the "cross edition rights" on the datacenter license?

As you can see, having 2000 licenses does not necessarily help your compliance.

The fact that you have assigned your licenses but these are not providing coverage (hence the negative compliance) suggests the assignments you have made are "invalid". Please use the invalid assignment report to identify the reason. The most common issues are listed below:

• When assigning Datacenter licenses there are a few common errors that cause this problem. Firstly, it is important to ensure that you license the entire DCC. You cannot license select hosts, you must license to the full core requirement for all hosts within the DCC. The easiest way to do this, is to ensure your assignments are to a specific DCC, rather than individual hosts. If you haven't licensed all hosts then the entire assignment won't work.

• Additionally, the license you are assigning must be of an equal or higher version than the highest version residing in the cluster.

• Another common issue is "Cross Edition rights". These, along with downgrade rights must be selected when assigning Datacenter licenses.

• Ensure that the compliance has recalculated.

Once you have done the above, you can use the "License tracking per computer" report, filtered on Windows Server to locate "unlicensed" instances.

Unlike licenses that are set to auto-assign, any unassigned licenses will not show as surplus and will therefore not reconcile against the current non-compliance. Therefore, you will only see non-compliance until you resolve the above invalid assignments issue.

Many thanks

Kelly