Hi All,
I'm just going through a painful licence data collection exercise. I have some
80 nodes registered, but not all these need to be paid for as we set up one
node per application on our clusters.
Up till now I was managing this adequately with an excel spreadsheet because I
just needed to keep track of separate machines:tier1 for Wintel and Tier 2 for
everything else. Now, with new new licencing model I need to know how many CPUs
as well and this information is not easy to get.
I've "outsourced" the setting up of new nodes on non-AIX platforms to the
platform support guys, and even if I manually intervened when I created new
nodes, it is really easy for someone to move a node from one machine to
another, or install a new CPU board and I don't get to know about it. I've
looked into pushing scripts down to all my nodes and trying to run some sort of
command to get the number of cpus, but this is very difficult to do. On Wintel
there is a command, but only if you have the reskit installed and you can run
the cscript command etc etc. There are even some boxes that I back up that I
have no rights to and have never even had this sort of information.
I therefore suggest that there is a requirement for
1. a data collection mechanism to return to the TSM server the number of CPUs
and other relevent licencing information on a regular basis. This information
should include the system serial number where this is available, or some sort
of checksum based on installed equipment a-la Windows XP's anti-piracy feature
where it is not.
2. This data to be stored appropriately in the database.
3. Audit lic to be updated to report licence compliance in the same terms as
are required by Passport Advantage licencing. ie by number of CPUs on distinct
machines.
This requirement could be satisfied by simple extensions to the TSM database
NODES table to hold the appropriate information. The information could be
passsed at dsmc startup in the same way that the IP address is. The only
difficult issue is that Intel architecture machines don't have serial numbers.
THe windows XP checksum approach will work here even if it doesn't all that
well on XP because we are only trying to make a unique checksum for comparison
purposes. We don't care if it changes provided that it changes in the same way
for all nodes that run on the machine. The checksum mechanism should also be
the same for all OSes running on intel architecture so that correct licencing
is available for machines logically partioned using VMware or equivalent
products.
I was recently involved in a backup product selection exercise and ease or
difficulty of licence mangement was a huge issue amongst the admins at various
levels in the organization, for several different products. At that time TSM
had a big plus because managment was easy. It is no longer.
Discussion?
Steve Harris
AIX and TSM Admin
Brisbane Australia
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