Clusters of physical servers

[gajah_oren]

Hi all,

I've searched the forum but couldn't find anything on this.

Issue: we have a cluster of physical servers that are not listed on "Virtual Devices and Clusters" because they are physical machines.

Question: what do you do to track these devices in Flexera?

I need to know which are active machines and which are passive machines because of licensing matters. For e.g. with Microsoft EA, if we deploy SQL Server on an active machine and a passive machine, you only need to license the active machine.

Flexera has the option to classify a machine by its type (i.e. label it as either active, passive, test/dev, etc.). As part of the license setup, I can configure Flexera to ignore passive machines from the license count. Knowing which cluster the physical servers sit on can tell if you need to relabel your machines (i.e change the category from passive to active to cater to license rules).

Scenario: let's say a new physical machine is added to a cluster of physical machines (these are not hosts). The cluster already has 1 active and 1 passive machines. You were informed the new machine is a passive server. So you end up with a cluster of 1 Active and 2 passive servers. If these machines are SQL Servers, then per Microsoft rules the second passive machine will consume a SQL Server license. Since Flexera doesn't have a cluster page for physical machines I will not know the cluster is now a cluster of 1A + 2P servers. If such a page exists, I'll know not to categorize the new machine as a passive server. I can always check for cluster information with our Server/Datacenter team but I want to know if this is something that can be tracked in Flexera.

[ChrisG]

It sounds like you are looking for information about SQL Server clustering here. FlexNet Manager Suite / Flexera One ITAM does not gather that type of information.

The following idea may be related to what you are seeking to do here, so you could consider voting for and commenting on it if this would be useful for you: ITAM-I-221: Supply additional cluster types in Flexera

[mfranz · Accepted solution]

As Chris already mentioned, FNMS does cover "infrastructure" clusters, but not "logical" clusters (like active/passive for SQL). Depending on your setup and/or the available data, maybe consider these:

• Some companies have naming conventions that allow the identification of machines "belonging together". Based on that, a custom report could be created or a Business Import to update a custom field. Or you could automate the setting of device roles or license exemptions.
• Something similar would be possible if you had external data, maybe from a CMDB or comparable system.

We did something like this for a customer a while back and we worked with the assumption that 1 of 2 machines would be the active node and the 2nd machine would be passive, without actually knowing which one was which.