License – VMFocus

How To: Rehost HP StoreVirtual Licenses

Posted on 1 March 201511 January 2021 by Craig

I’m not sure exactly when, but HP changed the licensing portal from ‘Poetic’ to a new portal named ‘My HP Licensing Portal’. All of the information looked exactly the same, however you could not rehost HP StoreVirtual Licenses.

The purpose of this blog post is to assist anyone who was in the same situation as me, scratching their head trying to figure it out!

Problem

You have an existing HP StoreVirtual license which ties the feature set to the first NIC MAC address on your StoreVirtual VSA. You have changed, upgraded or redeployed your VSA and you need to rehost the license onto the new MAC address.

Solution

Browse to myhplicensing.hp.com and login for your email address and password that you use for your portal account.

Note: If you are not sure what email address is tied to your account login to HP Licensing for Software and select Administration > My Profile which will show your email address.

Once logged into My HP Licensing select Rehost Licenses

Next select Rehost Licenses and click on the MAC Address you want to update

Select the tick box to confirm this is the license that you want rehosting and then click Rehost.

Select ‘Enter New Locking ID’ and enter the MAC Address of the first network adapter on your StoreVirtual. Then click Next

This bit takes a while but once done you will receive the license file which can be saved or emailed

Horizon View License Upgrade Tool

Posted on 12 February 201511 January 2021 by Craig

The past eighteen months has seen huge investment by VMware within the EUC space, with the arrival of Sanjay Poonen and Horizon (with View) 6 which introduced application publishing in the Advanced edition. Finally we had an emerging contender to the heavy weight Citrix XenApp.

With this investment from VMware, the past twelve months have seen an increased number of customers looking at virtualizing desktops and applications, this has lead to an increased conversations about how to upgrade existing licenses and the best route to take depending on what features are required and what license model.

Per Named User
- For virtual environments with staff that need dedicated access to a virtual machine throughout the day
Per Concurrent Connection
- For virtual environments with a high number of shift workers where machines are shared between workers throughout the day (e.g. students, shift workers)

VMware have caught onto the minefield and have released the VMware End User Computing Upgrade Path Tool which will show you what SKU’s are required to move to Horizon 6.

vCOPS for View Licensing

Posted on 26 January 201411 January 2021 by Craig

Having not deployed vCenter Operations Manager for View in the ‘wild’ I wasn’t sure of the licensing model. After some research and help from the community I was able to answer my questions, so thought I would ‘pay it forward’ and put together a blog post.

vCOPS for View

Q. What monitoring does it include?

A. The ability to monitor the number of Horizon View desktops that you have purchased. Also included is monitoring of your Connection and Security Servers.

Q. Do I need to purchase vCOPS separately as a management portal?

A. No, this is included

Note The vCOPS portal is specific to View and does not give you the ability to monitor your vSphere environment except for Connection and Security Servers.

Q. I want to use my existing vCOPS to monitor View what version do I need?

A. At least Advanced edition.

Note I changed my Standard vCOPS license to Enterprise on a free trial key and then added the View adapter. I then reverted back to the Standard license to see what would happen, Unfortunately, you receive the error message ‘this product is unlicensed or cannot connect to the vSphere Server. Use a vSphere Client to connect to the vCenter Server and assign a license key’.

Thanks to the following chaps from Twitter for their input:

Sunny Dua @Sunny_Dua
Michael Armstrong @m80arm
Hersey Cartwright @herseyc
Thomas Brown @thombrown

vSphere 5.1 – My Take On What’s New/Key Features

Posted on 27 August 201211 January 2021 by Craig

With the release of vSphere 5.1, it’s been tough keeping up with all the tweets and information from VMworld 2012 San Francisco.

With the plethora of data, I thought it would be handy to blog about what the key features that will have the biggest impact on my every day life.

Licensing

vRAM – It’s gone, licensing is back to per physical processor.

vSphere Essentials Plus – Now includes vSphere Storage Appliance and vSphere Replication.

vSphere Standard – Now includes vSphere Storage Appliance, vSphere Replication, Fault Tolerance, Storage vMotion and vCentre Operations Manager Advanced.

Beneath The Hood

Monster Virtual Machines

Virtual Machines, can now have the following hardware features:

1TB RAM
64 vCPUs
> 1 Million IOPS per VM

Wonder if I will continue to have those we need a physical SQL server conversation?

This is made possible by Virtual Machine Format 9.

vMotion

vMotion no longer requires shared storage. This has been achieved by combining vMotion and Storage vMotion into a single operation. So when a VM is moved, it moves the memory, processing threads and disk over the network to it’s target.

Now what is really, cool it maintains the same performance levels as the older vMotion with shared storage!

Note, I recommend that you use multiple NIC’s for vMotion as per my post High Availability for vMotion

vSphere Replication

Enables virtual machine data to be replicated over LAN and WAN. Previously to achieve 15 minutes a-synchronous replication you need sub 2 ms latency.

vSphere Replication integrates with Microsoft’s Volume Shadow Copy (VSS) ensuring that applications such as Exchange and SQL will be in a consistent state if DR was implemented.

vSphere Replication can be used for up to 500 virtual machines.

The initial seed can be done offline and taken to the destination to save bandwidth and time.

VMware Tools

No more downtime to upgrade VMware Tools.

vSphere Web Client

This is going to be the tool for administrating vCentre. Some pretty cool features like vCenter Inventory Tagging, which means you can apply meta data to items and then such on them e.g. group applications together for a particular department or vendor.

We now have the ability to customise the web client to give it ‘our look and feel’.

Always getting called away when you are half way through adding a vNIC to a VM, well we can now pause this and it appears in ‘work in progress’ so we never forgot to complete an action.

For the pub quiz fans, you can have 300 concurrent Web Client users.

Link Aggregation Control Protocol Support

Used to ‘bind’ several physical connections together for increased bandwidth and link failure (think Cisco Port Channel Groups), this is now a supported feature in vSphere 5.

Memory Overhead Reduction

Every task undertaken by vSphere has an overhead, whether this is a vCPU or a vNIC, it requires some attached memory. A new feature allows upto 1GB of memory back from a vSphere host which is under pressure.

Latency Sensitivity Setting

vSphere 5.1 makes it easier to support low latency applications (something which I have encountered with Microsoft Dynamics AX). The ability to ‘tweek’ latency for an individual VM is great.

Storage

We now have 16Gb Fiber Channel support and iSCSI Storage Driver has been upgraded. Some very impressive increases in performance.

Thin provisioning has always been an issue unless your array supported T10 UNMAP. With vSphere 5.1 a new virtual disk has been introduced the ‘sparse virtual disk’ AKA SE spare disk. It’s major function is to reclaim previously used space in the guest OS. This feature alone is worth the upgrade.

How Do I Get VMware vSphere Licenses For My Home Lab/Test Environment?

Posted on 16 August 201211 January 2021 by Craig

I was talking to several colleagues recently who mentioned it was a real pain having to rebuild his home lab vCentre environment every sixty days.

They did not know that VMware offer NFR (not for resale) licenses, which are available if the company you work for is a VMware Partner.

VMware provides partners with access to a number of VMware software products to enable a successful VMware virtualization practice. Not for Resale (NFR) software is available to partners for product demonstration and training purposes only. One year of subscription services is included with NFR software as long as the partner remains in good standing within the parameters of the VMware Partner Program.

How Does My Company Receive NFR?

NFR licenses are automatically delivered by VMware to the headquarter location upon membership progression (such as Registered to Professional or Professional to Enterprise) and release of new products. Licenses that are provided as part of the NFR offering are delivered to the License Administrator via ESD (Electronic Software Distribution) or to the primary contact if a license administrator has not been identified

Before we move on, a little disclaimer, I don’t know what criteria VMware use to accept or validate requests for NFR licenses, nor do I know any hacks or cracks to gain free VMware licenses.

To put forward a case for NFR licenses you have to register for VMware Partner Central by entering the company you work for and having these details validated by a representative from your company.

Once logged into VMware Partner Central, select ‘Partner University’ from the top menu bar

From the left hand side select ‘Contact Us’

On the right hand side select ‘Submit a Case Now’

Under Reason select Question/Inquiry

Under Issue Category select Benefit / Entitlement

Under Issue Type select Not for Resale Licenses (NFR)

You will need to enter a subject and explain the reasons/business case for the request for any extra NFR licenses.

My experience submitting cases via Partner Central has been extremely positive, normally you receive a response within 24 hours and an answer within 48 hours.