VMware licensing management – a proposal for change
A couple of weeks ago I talked to a co-worker who is responsible for selling VMware licenses and other VMware related stuff. As a VMware partner it isn’t always easy to manage the licenses for customers nor selling or upgrading their licenses if they bought them from another partner in the past.
A lot of the times multiple people register VMware licenses. For example, if I am the person that has to request or register licenses I probably will do it with my own VMware account. If I leave the company the licenses still are connected to me as a person. I know you can use a general account and register your licenses with that, but that goes against anything I ever learnt about security and identity management.
If you already have licenses there is also no easy way to ‘push’ them to another account, for example a general account. You can do this through the support desk, but takes all kinds of effort.
From a viewpoint of the license admininstrator it’s hard to keep track of all licenses that a company has for VMware products.
What I would like to see is a licensing portal with the following characteristics:
- You can register a company that becomes owner of the licenses it buys
- You can register as an employee for that company
- As a employee you register licenses for your company or for personal use
- Employees have the possibility to ‘push’ licenses from personal to corporate
- If you buy licenses with your partner you give your corporate ID so that any new licenses or grant numbers are placed under your company
- As a license admininstrator you can grant persons or partners the opportunity to view your licenses
Not that I want to make VMware the problem owner, but it would definitely make the whole job of license management a lot easier in my opinion.
By the way: Just do a search and replace of VMware by any other product vendor and I think my points are still valid.
Related Posts
7 Comments
Leave a Reply Cancel reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
HEAR HEAR!
And I concur on the search/replace as well.
HEAR HEAR!
And I concur on the search/replace as well.
You are absolutely right! I had similiar issues because all licenses were registered by a person who left the company. It took weeks until VMware had linked those licenses to my account. Another problem we had was that we bought our licenses through HP which made things a lot more complicated than it was. VMware sent us a few times excel sheets with licenses but they were mixed with licenses of the company in other countries. Horrible! I think your points for the licensing portal would make it a lot better and easier to manage.
btw: great article!
You are absolutely right! I had similiar issues because all licenses were registered by a person who left the company. It took weeks until VMware had linked those licenses to my account. Another problem we had was that we bought our licenses through HP which made things a lot more complicated than it was. VMware sent us a few times excel sheets with licenses but they were mixed with licenses of the company in other countries. Horrible! I think your points for the licensing portal would make it a lot better and easier to manage.
btw: great article!
As a German VAR for VMWare I would like to thank you for your statement. Thinking of bigger organisations and the way how VMWare handles its licenses it is right now not usable. In my personal opinion they must change their way of handling licenses very fast, because they don’t have the ability themseves to handle it – f.e. Renewal Quotes (everytime a thriller).
As a German VAR for VMWare I would like to thank you for your statement. Thinking of bigger organisations and the way how VMWare handles its licenses it is right now not usable. In my personal opinion they must change their way of handling licenses very fast, because they don’t have the ability themseves to handle it – f.e. Renewal Quotes (everytime a thriller).