This week ITC teamed up with HPE to bring you our webcast “Discover Oracle LMS in 1, 2, 3!” featuring HPE’s Universal Discovery (HPE UD) for handling Oracle license management.
What is the cost model?
The way HPE UD works, is that it’s considered a foundational tool, as long as you purchase other capabilities, using it comes along with it. For Universal Discovery you have 2 types of licenses: one is for HPE UD Inventory only, which would be used for collecting information on the servers that you have on the environment and how they are configured, so it’s using it for asset management as well as what software is installed on that server. That does not give you the ability to discover details of the software that is running – this is contained in a different license called HPE UD Full, which includes the inventory capabilities plus the ability to scan all dependencies and details.
For example, the Oracle software is dependent on the server to run it, so scanning that software would require a HPE UD Full license. These licenses are dependent on OS – so if you purchase 10 UDI or UDF licenses, you will be able to scan 10 servers. Using the track you can tell at any time how many licenses you’ve consumed, and it differentiates them according to the activities you run.
For the UD Full license, the pricing is based on software and # of IPs being scanned?
It’s based on the OS. If you scan an IP, it would consume no licenses. As soon as you scan a server with a OS, you’d be using the license. There are a set of inventory activities which only consume HPE UD licenses, so if you can 100 IPs, but only scan 10 servers that have software, you0’d consume 10 licenses.
A multi-vendor approach for Software Asset Management is very complex, do you have clients in Mexico that have installed this tool?
We have several success stories and Gartner has clearly acknowledged the HPE solution in terms of discovery, normalization and optimization. I would encourage an opportunity to perform a quick POC on the top SAM use cases.
Do we need to install this software on every Oracle DB server to get information about oracle licensing?
At the level that is scanning, it is running agentless, so it would need credentials to access certain components of the database to do that from a read-only perspective. You can assure your DBAs that you’re not actually touching data on the database. You’re not installing anything on the database itself. The process is: HPE UD connects to the database like you would manually, it needs a credential that you set up beforehand so it has the authority to work, and then runs the scripts remotely on the database server collecting the data. Afterwards, HPE UD removes itself from the server once finished.
Does this software take care of Oracle Real Application Cluster Configuration/ Oracle Data guard?
For oracle RAC and oracle data guard, we have a complete topology discovery solution (agent based and agentless options), which is used with Asset manager to provide compliance reporting.
There are many options at the O/S level like hyperthreading/ CPU type impacting oracle licensing? Does this software take care of that?
Hyperthreading is still a discovery gap which HPE UD is not able to resolve. Currently we must manually get the list of hyperthreaded servers to reconcile the data to get customer core numbers.