2009/11/29 JoeBilish <bilishr at hotmail.com>: > Hi Mike and Trevor, > > Thanks for your reply. > > Yes, you are right. This scheme do have defect. > > From the customer view of point. If the license is base on number of > cores, they only want to pay for the cores they use, so within > LDOM, they only pay for the CPUs assigned to that LDom. And If they > have already paid for a core, within a LDom, they don't want to pay > for it again within other LDom. (In this case, the two LDoms share > that core). > If you license by socket or core, you are just begging for customer problems related to licensing because the ldoms software does not provide a means for assigning specific strands (vcpus) to specific ldoms. As such, a customer that has licensed a single socket or maybe a core or two of a single socket will have no way of ensuring that a single multi-vcpu ldom exists only on the licensed components. The problem is compounded when running multiple ldoms and/or a multiple socket system.
> Out scheme is aim to fulfill this purpose. If it difficult to > implement this scheme, do you know any other license scheme to > support virtualization? Instead of licensing per socket or core on Niagara based systems, how about licensing by strand? Is the CPU capacity really the thing that captures the essence of how valuable the software is to the customer? I've run across very few business applications that are really CPU constrained. It is much more common to have memory be the constraint. The memory footprint is likely to be rather consistent between CPU models, even across CPU generations and architectures, eliminating the need for complicated platform-specific algorithms. I suspect that this memory constraint is correlated to the number of concurrent users, the transaction rate, or the data set size (depending on the nature of your application). These may be other ways to license. No matter what way you do it, you will need to have some trust in your customers. Just make it easy for those that wish to be compliant with licensing terms to do so. If you make it easy for them to comply, it also makes it easier for you to audit compliance should you suspect unlicensed usage. -- Mike Gerdts http://mgerdts.blogspot.com/
