Simulation

IT Asset Management (Cloud)

Some license models offered by software vendors these days are very sensitive to the specific hardware on which the licensed software products are installed. They also make use of very complex counting rules. This is particularly relevant when the software is installed on, and licensed for, virtualized environments.

The license types modeled in the simulation feature are consumed according to processing capacity (for example, per processor), rather than per computer or per user. Also, they allow for sub-capacity licensing: that is, where the virtual machine running the software is limited to only a fraction of the processing capacity of the host server, then only a related portion of the processing power of the server is taken into account in the licensing.

It is also common for these more complex licenses to relate to high cost software. This makes it valuable to optimize the licenses that must be purchased for these cases.

License simulation models the impact of hardware and configuration changes for the following license types:

  • Core Points
  • IBM PVU
  • Microsoft Server Core
  • Microsoft Server Processor
  • Oracle Processor
  • Processor
  • Processor Points.
Note: The IBM PVU license type, and the Microsoft Server license types (Processor and Core), are only available when you have licensed the FlexNet Manager for Datacenters product.
You might choose to experiment with these licenses because:
  • They are high value
  • They use complex accounting rules
  • They rely on hardware processing capacity
  • They allow for sub-capacity licensing in virtualized environments
  • You can assess the impact of planned hardware upgrades on software costs
  • You can check the license costs of moving a VM to a different resource pool
  • You can measure the impacts of moving software into an existing hardware cluster
  • You can predict the license effects of migrations between VMs, or moving from a physical to a virtual machine...

And so on.

Keep in mind that nothing you do in a simulation has any effect in your real-world license management. This is a place for safely trying out "what if" scenarios.

Every simulation is based on a snapshot taken from the latest license reconciliation calculations. That snapshot is preserved, along with your simulated changes, for as long as you continue working with the simulation (that is, the underlying data is stable, and not affected by subsequent reconciliation calculations).