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  • 1.  License reporting - any tools for that?

    Posted Nov 03, 2011 11:07 AM

    Hi,

    I would like to know if there are any good tools or PowerCLI commands or anything to help our VMware license reporting.

    Here are the items I would like to know when VMware admin needs to make a report on VMware license usage:

    VMware vCenter Server information

    1. vCenter license key (really the actual license key that is used for that vCenter)
    2. ESX Enterprise license key (the actual license key where the CPU's are allocated to ESX hosts)
    3. Number of ESX hosts (for statistical use)
    4. Number of Virtual Machines (for statistical use)

    All ideas are welcome. I tried to find the answer from the Community (hopefully I didn't miss any important posts :smileywink:) and talked with VMware guy in Genius Bar at VMworld Europe 2011 about this. No solution found yet.

    Br,

    Marko



  • 2.  RE: License reporting - any tools for that?

    Posted Nov 07, 2011 10:45 AM

    You can get all of these information out of vCenter by:
    Home-> Licensing = everything about licenses

    Datacenter summary page= Everything about hosts, vms, etc

    Should you need more informations, I recommend you to use the vSphere admins freeware: RVTools (http://www.robware.net/)
    This is a phantastic piece of software to report nearly anything! :smileywink:



  • 3.  RE: License reporting - any tools for that?

    Posted Nov 07, 2011 11:35 AM

    Hi,

    I see now that my question was quite incomplete because you didn't understood what I mean or you were just sarcastic. :smileywink:

    Anyway, the problem still exists.

    Let me explain a bit the reporting as many are using license keys that has no expiration date. We have a difference licensing model with VMware and we need to report amount of CPU's used in our company to VMware on quarterly basis.

    We ask admins to collect the information and put that into the Excel sheet (SOX compliancy) and send that to us. What is difficult and very challenging is that admins many times send wrong information. For checking that their report is correct, we have asked screenshots from them to verify their reporting.

    So I'm interested in any automation in that side if possible. I basically don't care how it's done (free tool or script is preferred :smileyhappy: ), but ideally we just send e.g. PowerCLI command to admins and tell them to run it and put the result in the email. That way we could eliminate as much as possible human errors in the reports.

    Hopefully this clarifies what we try to achieve.

    Br,

    Marko