Licensing

[David Coffey]

Recently my Infor sales guy told me my organization’s licensing for Cloverleaf was limited to 4 CPUs.  Due to corporate restructuring on both my side and the vendor’s side no one can come up with documentation related to  this statement.

Is licensing of the Cloverleaf product structured in this manner?

David Coffey

Topic

[Peter Heggie]

It has been here since I’ve been here – 5 years.

Peter Heggie

[Michael Hertel]

For those of us who have had Cloverleaf since the 90’s, most of us are unlimited.

I believe the limited offerings started when Quovadx took over.

So depending on when you bought Cloverleaf, you might not be limited.

Also, I didn’t know that one of the limitations cpus but threads.

Now that I’ve said that, are you merely asking about number of environments/hosts?

We have 2 licenses, 1 – Prod, 1 – Test/DEV. So I suppose we are limited to two cpus but unlimited threads.

[Peter Heggie]

Yes, I should explain more.

Sometimes, when making ‘large’ organizational changes, or making ‘significant’ computing environment changes, some vendors will review and update the licensing terms.

Unlimited or enterprise licensing is usually a better deal in the long run, although sometimes it may be difficult to purchase this.

I don’t know how the license ID number in the license.dat file is generated but I think it is based on MAC Address and/or machine serial number. I think this was discussed in another thread. So changing the number of cpus might not change the generated HOSTID but contractually, usually a  cpu count (limit) is specified. Adding more cpus or migrating to a machine with more cpus will almost always increase your licensing costs.

Usually specific details, or even general terms, of a contract are protected information. All I can say is that it would be worth your while to find those original documents and to review the purchase and maintenance terms carefully.

Peter Heggie

[Russ Ross]

I’ve certainly heard of licensing based on max number of threads running at one time.

This is the first conversation I’ve heard asking about max number of CPUs being a possible restriction.

I was under the impression that a minimum of 2 CPUs is required to even be supported by the vendor.

Plus virtual CPU versus physical CPU gets to be fun at knowing what is being discussed as well.

We run on AIX and have 4 grand fathered unlimted licenses and originally started with one physical CPU for each environment, giving us 4 virtual CPUs for each cloverleaf licensed environment.

Currently we have increased our cloverleaf LPARs up to 5 physical CPUs each, yielding 20 virtual CPUs for a single cloverleaf environment.

Another point that goes along with increasing CPUs is increasing RAM, on AIX you definitely want somewhere between 1GB-2GB per virtual CPU.

Right now we have 32GB of RAM to support the use of our 20 virtual CPUs and rarely see any use of paging space with those allocations.

It is important to have enough RAM allocated so that paging space is never used because from my observation cloverleaf becomes slow to the point of useless when that happens.

If on AIX the command “lsps -a” will show the percentage of paging space used and best if that is zero.

The licensing on AIX server is tied to the physical machines serial number but other platforms I’ve seen duscussions talk about MAC address being used.

This is important to determine if you plan to do a vmotion or logical partiion mobility to another physical box on the fly.

If dynamically moving to another AIX box on the fly while Cloverleaf interfaces are up and running, they will continue to run but if stopped will no longer start unless the box is licensed.

Some people I’ve heard take that risk for a short maintenance window but we haven’t other than to do a proof of concept.

Russ Ross
RussRoss318@gmail.com

[John Mercogliano]

We just added a second production server and even though we have unlimited threads we do have a max limit on cpu per server.  We have been told we would need to rework our license if we wanted to add additional cpu’s.

John Mercogliano
Sentara Healthcare
Hampton Roads, VA

[Russ Ross]

That’s sort of sneaky because without being able to increase system resources like CPUs to handle new interface growth, at some point you indirectly have a cap on threads due to a lack of resources needed.

Russ Ross
RussRoss318@gmail.com

[John Mercogliano]

My thoughts exactly.  After looking at things we ended up getting an enterprise license with the same cpu limit so we could add a second pair and it gave us Global Monitor.

John Mercogliano
Sentara Healthcare
Hampton Roads, VA

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