Red Hat licensing configuration

[OutOnTheWeekend]

Hi all hope you can help.

My company have a mixture of RHEL licenses, 2 core, 4 core etc, however, the issue I am having is with our one virtual node licenses, I basically want any virtual machine running RHEL to consume the virtual node license, I don't then think I will have an issue getting the processor licenses to consume on number of CPU's for the actual devices.

Is this possible? it seems this will save an awful lot of hassle having to allocate machines as they are getting spun up and down all the time.

Thanks for any help

[mrichardson]

Hi @OutOnTheWeekend,

It would help to understand what license type you're using and also what FNMS version.

The reason for this is that I know that there was a fix added in FNMS 2019 R1 that will specifically help with licensing RedHat servers.

In general terms, in the Application you can determine the priority of licenses that are consumed and so you could set your virtual node license to be priority number 1 which would consume that however it wouldn't differentiate between physical and virtual machines.

RHEL licensing does normally go off having the host CPUs licensed by you divide the guests by half which is possible in 2019 R1.

Does this help?

[OutOnTheWeekend]

Hi there, 

Thanks for your reply, so I am currently using 2 different license types across 4 separate licenses but am struggling to get it to show correctly, we are running 2017 R3.

What I have done so far is set up a device license for the 1 virtual node licenses, I have set this to consume first in each application, I have then allocated a license to each VM. I then have 3 other licenses, 1 for 2 core, 1 for 4 core and one for 8 core and limited the processors accordingly in the license, my hope is that the vm's allocated will consume in the virtual node license and then the physical cpu's will bounce into their relevant license based on the number of processors.

I will check in the morning after an overnight reconcile.

Thanks again for your help. 

[OutOnTheWeekend]

ok so this didn't work, the device license I set up is showing the number of allocations as the correct number of virtual machines, however, the consumption is still higher by over 4000 devices, the number of physical computers.

I am guessing this is a restriction on device licenses, it states in the License consumption rules rules that 

"Installations always consume license entitlements."

Despite only ticking Allocations consume license entitlements, is this correct? is there another license type that will only show consumption on the allocated devices?

I understand that in general how RHEL licensing works, however, this isnt how our agreement was set up.

I did find this which seems like a similar issue where only  vm's are wanted to consume license's but it seems there is no plan to implement, is there any work around?

https://community.flexera.com/t5/FlexNet-Manager-Knowledge-Base/Scope-Restrict-Licenses-is-there-way-to-restrict-to-workstations/ta-p/5878

[kclausen]

While this will be cumbersome, you will need to allocate each of the physical servers to the correct license based on the number of processors/cores to get the desired outcome that you are looking for.

The option of "Allocations consume license entitlements" tells FNMS that if a device is allocated to the license then it will consume even if there are no applications installed on that server that are found on the "Applications" tab of the license.