Asset Management Group

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  • 1.  Is it possible to control the OS licenses through the Altiris?

    Posted Oct 09, 2013 01:56 PM

    How you treat your Operating System license?

    Altiris handles licenses and software purchases in Manage>Software | and | Service and Asset Management>Software Licensing.

    This is where I add the licenses of Microsoft Office, Adobe applications and other software. Altiris automatically adds software like Office 2007 in the category: Desktop Application. But where It works with OS licenses? I found a category called Operating System at the same place.

    My question is: Is it possible to control the OS licenses through the Altiris? (AMS 7.1)

    When I'm on investigation or audit of Microsoft I need to provide the number of workstations with Windows 7 or other operating system and the relationship between my licenses. (I have OS licenses types: volume, FPP and OEM). I’m in compliance or not? Everybody needs this!

    When I asked an engineer at Symantec (in Brazil) he answered: “According to my experience, we do not control the OS license. Only software such as Office , Photoshop , Corel , etc.”

    Altiris does not control the whole lifecycle of my assets? OS license is an asset, must be saved invoice, contracts, serial numbers, different set of types (volume/OEM/FPP).



  • 2.  RE: Is it possible to control the OS licenses through the Altiris?

    Posted Oct 22, 2013 07:23 AM

    I haven't found it and I'm looking for the same answer.

    I'm using a custom report to track it.  Alternately, you may be able to use targetted software inventory to get the OS listed as a managable software title to which you can associate software licenses.  I choose a custom report because it seemed easier to maintain.



  • 3.  RE: Is it possible to control the OS licenses through the Altiris?

    Posted Dec 17, 2013 11:30 AM

    You may have to use custom inventory to gather the relevant information from the machine that determines if its OS license is an OEM/VL/etc, if this is at all possible.

    Once you have that, you maybe able to associate your OS License object with that custom data or you may have to create a user defined data class which would allow you to do it.



  • 4.  RE: Is it possible to control the OS licenses through the Altiris?

    Posted Mar 31, 2014 04:06 PM
      |   view attached

    I think this query can help...

    SELECT vcomputer.[OS Name] as [Sistema Operacional],
    COUNT (vcomputer.[OS Name]) as [Installed],
    sum(distinct Inv_SoftwareProduct_ComplianceInfo.[Purchased Licenses])as [Purchased Licenses],
    (sum(distinct Inv_SoftwareProduct_ComplianceInfo.[Purchased Licenses]) - COUNT (vcomputer.[OS Name])) as [Compliance]
    From vcomputer
    join RM_ResourceSoftware_Product
    on vcomputer.[OS Name] = RM_ResourceSoftware_Product.[Name]
    join Inv_SoftwareProduct_ComplianceInfo
    on Inv_SoftwareProduct_ComplianceInfo._ResourceGuid = RM_ResourceSoftware_Product.[Guid]
    where vcomputer.IsManaged = '1'
    Group by vcomputer.[OS Name]

    Attachment(s)

    zip
    OSCompliance.zip   378 B 1 version


  • 5.  RE: Is it possible to control the OS licenses through the Altiris?

    Posted Apr 01, 2014 02:07 AM

    I can advice you to read MS documents describing your licensing models. Today it is still the only way to learn how you could count your licenses, and after that you will have to do some CMDB customizations (resource types, dataclasses, custom inventory). This will help collect the data for license report.

    As far as I know there is no enterprise solution from any vendor (even from MS), which can track MS OS licenses out of box.

    We did this work about a year ago and here is some cases about MS licensing we've investigated:

    1. It looks like sometimes there is no way to determine licence type inside OS. So first of all you have to know how many licenses of each type do you have.

    2. For Server OS you should know about license downgrading (e.g. you can cover Server 2008 Enterprise installation with 2 Server 2012 Standard licenses) and difference between how does licenses count (Server 2008 license counts per CPU Core, but Server 2012 counts per CPU Socket), and some other cases like licensing Servers in Virtual Environment (you can cover all VMs with single Server 2012 Datacenter license). All this cases help to optimize license consumption



  • 6.  RE: Is it possible to control the OS licenses through the Altiris?

    Posted Apr 01, 2014 02:57 PM

    You can create an OS software resource and associate that with a software purchase and software license, and then assign an authorised collection to it (you will need to eidt existing data classesd as well as create new ones); however, that still does not map the actual license being used on those machines to the license objects, unless you also use a method to obtain the encrypted license key and use custom inventory to populate the database with it.



  • 7.  RE: Is it possible to control the OS licenses through the Altiris?

    Posted Apr 02, 2014 10:52 AM

    This is actually, not a bad workaround.  Once you create your software releases, create the license, attribute the Covered Product and the purchases, it works quite nicely.

    Thank you for posting it.