Licensing in Virtualised Environments
Well, there is a real problem here with ensuring you are neither under nor over licensed in a consolidated and virtualised world. Within the SPARC/Solaris world the degrees of confusion include:
How many CPUs do I count my 8 core, 64 thread UltraSPARC T2 socket as being?
If I cut my servers into Logical Domains, do I need to license the whole server or just the stuff in the domain?
What are the steps needed if I want to add more capacity to the domain?
If I have lots of Solaris containers running on a server, do I license by the share given or by the maximum the container could take if everything else went quiet?
If I have lots of Solaris containers running the same licensed software, do I license each container or just the server/domain?
This is heavy stuff, and short of agreeing some form of "all you can eat" licensing regime, it takes great skill and judgement to remain neither over nor under licensed.