March 2010
Effectively licensing a virtualised environment
Virtualisation has become one of the major buzz words of the last 4 years within the IT industry. According to Gartner:
"Virtualization will be the highest-impact trend changing infrastructure and operations through 2012... Virtualization will transform how IT is managed, what is bought, how it is deployed, how companies plan and how they are charged..." 1
The ROI your business could achieve through virtualisation could easily be negated if the business is found to be non-compliant as a result of insufficient or incorrect licensing. However, should effective software licence management be employed, the ROI enjoyed by your business could actually be increased through consequential savings on future software procurement.
The pace of technological change within virtualisation is such that vendor licensing schemes are being forced to change on a regular basis or become increasingly redundant. This fact alone creates a challenge for businesses to ensure they are adhering to the latest licensing rules when investing in new technologies.
Traditional software licence management processes, tools and rules are not enabling organisations to fully understand and optimise their software licence entitlement within virtualised estates. As businesses increasingly utilise virtualisation, requirements for services to reduce the complexity of associated licensing and new tools to effectively manage compliancy and cost effective use of VMs have emerged. You must ensure that your business is fully equipped with the expertise to deliver effective software licensing management for your virtualised estate.
Businesses have a natural dependency on third parties, primarily software vendors, to provide the licensing rules and tools to facilitate an effective approach to virtualisation. The fact that these necessary components are still in development makes it imperative that you work with partners that are thought leaders and trusted advisors in the field of software licensing for virtualised estates.
Virtualisation presents a number of risks for your business to manage should they wish to enjoy the benefits this technology can deliver. These risks can be managed through access to subject matter experts and tools which specialise in virtualisation.
Today, none of the major software vendors that offer virtualisation software have licensing models which have been fully documented and satisfy the many inevitable variations in your requirements. This highlights the need for an experienced view on what pitfalls and opportunities exist within virtualisation licensing models for businesses. Advice you should be seeking from licensing consultants should include:
- Analysis of the license conditions of all software vendors included in your virtualisation program, and, if needed, renegotiated terms.
- Analysis of your software support and maintenance contracts to ensure that support for products in virtual environments is included within the vendors' terms and conditions.
- Advice on what virtualisation software products you should use for its virtualisation program based on the potential licensing and thus cost impact one product would have over another.
- As software vendors realise the need to change the way their licensing schemes work and use non-hardware based licensing solutions that can work more easily within a virtual environment, you will need to be kept up to date on how such changes will impact your licensing costs and compliancy.
- Action on your behalf to negotiate special terms with vendors when your existing and outdated licensing terms with a vendor make it impossible for you to implement the vendor's virtualisation technology.
Virtualisation, especially that of the desktop, requires traditional software inventory tools to be updated and/or combined with new technology to account for the new methods of software deployment or actual lack of deployment of any traceable asset. Your business cannot afford to simply avoid including your virtualised estate in your software asset management processes. Failure to account for your virtualised estate could lead to extra licensing costs and non-compliancy fines that will wipe out any ROI achieved through your virtualisation rollout. To safeguard this ROI, you should be seeking to establish the necessary toolsets and software asset management processes during planning and take on of virtualisation and not retrospectively or reactively.
Your approach to software asset management for virtualisation should be a multi-faceted approach taking into account the immaturity and proprietary nature of existing tools on the market. You should be working with a partner who can provide expertise and experience in the range of tools available on a vendor by vendor basis. This will enable the role of trusted advisor to then be filled. Once again, early engagement of your business is imperative to avoid investment in the wrong tool and then having to invest in an alternative.
1 Gartner Press Release, April 2nd 2008
For more information visit www.trustmarque.com, call 0845 2101 500 or email info@trustmarque.com
