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Monthly Archives: April 2014
Have You Seen this Email? Microsoft Software Asset Management Review
By Rob O’Shaughnessy, Software Licensing Specialist, Pre-Sales Technical Support
I’ve been working in the GreenPages licensing department for over 14 years and many readers are probably asking the question, “why?” Do you honestly like torturing yourself, Rob? No, not really. I did have a full head of hair when I first started here and with each license change it recedes, so at least I’m saving on shampoo costs. Let’s face it, there are so many rules and regulations with licensing that it’s nearly impossible to keep up with. Just when you think you understand, it changes.
We’ve been seeing an increase with our customers getting emails with the subject line: Microsoft Software Asset Management Review. Have you received this email? If you haven’t yet, there’s a good chance you may see one float in your inbox. This is Microsoft’s asset management team. Their goal is to help you understand the licensing you currently own and match it up with what you’re running on your network. Basically, this is an audit.
Microsoft’s SAM doesn’t discriminate—everyone is a target. You’ll eventually have to deal with them so my recommendation is to not ignore the email. Now, just because you receive an email doesn’t necessarily mean you’re not compliant. Even if you’re 100% sure you’re compliant, it’s still best to work with them. I can tell you that if their findings suggest that you’re short on licenses, the only real penalty is that you have to buy the licenses. There are no fines, you’re not going to jail…this isn’t the Orange is the New Black.
I suggest that if you do receive this email that you reach out to us here at GreenPages. Like I said, I’ve been doing this a long time and there are some particulars of licensing that IMO the SAM team doesn’t know, especially when it comes to virtualization. Just a quick example: you may have 20 Windows Standard 2008 R2 VMs but only own five licenses. Are you in compliance? Yes. If you own Windows Enterprise 2008 R2 it allowed you to run up to 4 VMs with each license. In this example the SAM team didn’t know the old rule when Windows 2008 R2 was around. I mean, let’s face it, Microsoft licensing is confusing and the SAM team is human, so it’s always good to get a second set of eyes on it.
This post’s goal is not to scare you and indict you of any wrong doing. It’s to inform you. If you do see this email I wouldn’t ignore it as much as you may be tempted to. Hopefully it’s a quick and painless process for you, but regardless please let us know how we can assist. If you already have worked with the SAM team, we’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences!
Here are some FAQs I get from our customers:
Do I need a Windows Cal and RDS Cal? Yes, Microsoft requires you to stack the CALs. Same is true if you’re running Exchange, SharePoint, Lync etc. Both the Windows and the specific application Cal is required.
What’s up with SQL Core licensing? SQL moved from a per processor licensing model (when you got unlimited Cals) to per Core model when SQL 2012 was released. So, the deal is, if SQL is running on a physical sever, you have to tally up all the cores on that box. If SQL is running virtually you have to license all the cores allocated to the VM. A minimum of four cores are required for each scenario. This means that in a physical environment, even if the processor only has 2-cores, you’re still required to license four. Same in the virtual world. If you plan on only allocating 2 cores to the VM, Microsoft requires that you pay for 4-cores worth. The reason is the price of the former per processor license is the same as the price of 4 cores today. Licenses are sold in two-core packs. SQL Enterprise is now only licensed by the core.
What is multiplexing? This mainly pertains to SQL, but it basically means that if users are hitting an application directly or indirectly a CAL is still required. For example, your users are hitting a web server that has a back end SQL server. The users are not touching the SQL app directly, but they are accessing information from it. You need a CAL.
How do I reimage and downgrade my OEM Windows 8 Pro with a Windows 7 Pro MAK that I don’t have? First off, yes you can legally downgrade and reimage an OEM copy of Windows. The problem is getting the key to do it. If you purchase a PC that has Windows 8 Pro, but you need to load Windows 7 Pro without a key, what you can do is purchase a single volume license of Windows Professional. The cheapest way to do it is by purchasing an SA Only sku of Windows Pro. You have 90 days to purchase this license after your PC purchase. This will give you the ability to log onto the Volume Licensing Services Center (VLSC) site and obtain a MAK Windows 7 and download. You only need to purchase one license as it will give you multiple activations. If you need more you can call Microsoft Clearing House to obtain more.
The Outlook that’s included in Office Standard doesn’t allow Personal Archiving or Retention Polices when using the Exchange Enterprise Cal, but standalone Outlook and the Outlook included in Office Pro Plus does? Isn’t it the same Outlook? Yes, if you purchase the Exchange Cal you’re likely doing so to use the Personal Archiving or Retention Polices that are included with it. However, for it to work properly, you need to either own standalone Outlook (basically you can purchase Outlook a la carte) or Office Professional Plus. For whatever reason the Outlook that comes with Office Standard doesn’t work. Microsoft doesn’t have an answer for this.
Red Hat Summit summarised: The news you need to know about
The latest Red Hat Summit taking place in San Francisco from April 14 to 17 has resulted in several product launches, partnerships and collaborations. CloudTech has gobbled up the releases and put together a summary of the essential material.
Day one saw the launch of the OpenShift Marketplace, a software store which allows Red Hat customers to access complementary third party solutions from partners for the open source provider’s PaaS offering, OpenShift.
With this unveiling Red Hat joins an ever-growing list of companies with their own app store solution, in this case providing enterprise-grade PaaS to customers of all sizes.
Anything which helps developers is usually a good sign, particularly important for Red Hat given the company’s open source heritage. Several partners have already been signed up, with ClearDB, MongoLab and SendGrid among the more recognisable names.
“As the OpenShift partner ecosystem continues to expand, we expect the …
API Security: Securing Digital Channels and Mobile Apps Against Hacks
More and more enterprises today are doing business by opening up their data and applications through APIs. Though forward-thinking and strategic, exposing APIs also increases the surface area for potential attack by hackers. To benefit from APIs while staying secure, enterprises and security architects need to continue to develop a deep understanding about API security and how it differs from traditional web application security or mobile application security.
In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, Sachin Agarwal, VP of Product Marketing and Strategy at SOA Software, will walk you through the various aspects of how an API could be potentially exploited. He will discuss the necessary best practices to secure your data and enterprise applications while continue continuing to support your business’s digital initiatives.
SDDC – The Choice Is Yours
The revolution that happened in the server universe over the past 15 years has resulted in an eco-system that is more open, more democratically innovative and produced better results in technically challenging dimensions like scale. The underpinnings of the revolution were common hardware, standards based APIs (ex. POSIX) and a strict adherence to layering and isolation between applications, daemons and kernel drivers/modules which allowed multiple types of development happen in parallel without hindering others. Put simply, today’s server model is built on a consistent x86 platform with few surprises in its core components. A kernel abstracts away the platform, so that applications and daemons are decoupled from the hardware. In contrast, networking equipment is still stuck in the mainframe era. Today, networking equipment is a single appliance, including hardware, OS, applications and user interface come as a monolithic entity from a single vendor. Switching between different vendor’s hardware requires using a completely different OS, set of applications and user interface.
BMC Software and Microsoft Azure Simplify Cloud Management
BMC Software and Microsoft are continuing their longstanding relationship to help customers make the most of their hybrid cloud environments and accelerate delivery of their digital services to customers.
Now, customers of both BMC Software and Microsoft will be able to use BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management software to manage cloud infrastructure and services built on Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Services. Cloud Lifecycle Management creates an easy path for customers who want to migrate from VMware-based clouds to the Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Services platform. With these updates, customers will also have the ability to manage digital services delivery, consumption, operations, planning and compliance across multi-vendor cloud infrastructures from a single, unified management platform.
Peter Coffee on Leveraging the Web’s Transformation
Salesforce.com VP of Strategic Research Peter Coffee discusses how the web’s new capabilities are transforming the world around us, and how enterprises today can address their resistance to change by understanding the benefits of embracing new technologies.
Amazon, Google: a Battle to Dominate the Cloud
The cloud is just a vast mass of computers connected to the internet, on which people or companies can rent processing power or data storage as they need it.
All the warehouses of servers that run the whole of the internet, all the software used by companies the world over, and all the other IT services companies hire others to provide, or which they provide internally, will be worth some $1.4 trillion in 2014, according to Gartner Research—some six times Google and Amazon’s combined annual revenue last year.
When that time comes, all the world’s business IT needs will be delivered as a service, like electricity; you won’t much care where it was generated, as long as the supply is reliable.
Way back in 2006, Amazon had the foresight to start renting out portions of its own, already substantial cloud—the data centers on which it was running Amazon.com—to startups that wanted to pay for servers by the hour, instead of renting them individually, as was typical at the time. Because Amazon was so early, and so aggressive—it has lowered prices for its cloud services 42 times since first unveiling them, according to the company—it first defined and then swallowed whole the market for cloud computing and storage.
Even though Amazon’s external cloud business is much bigger than Google’s, Google still has the biggest total cloud infrastructure—the most servers and data centers. Tests of Amazon’s and Google’s clouds show that by one measure at least—how fast data is transferred from one virtual computer to another inside the cloud—Google’s cloud is seven to nine times faster than Amazon’s.
The question is, is Amazon’s lead insurmountable?
Turning the legal industry tanker around on cloud adoption
It seems that the days of fear, uncertainty and doubt surrounding cloud adoption will soon be well and truly behind us.
The majority of industry sectors have either already implemented, or have begun investigating, cloud services. Even the most security-conscious sectors are beginning to take their first steps into cloud computing as we have seen with central government and banking.
Cloud adoption in the UK is continuing to rise, with end user satisfaction soaring due to the flexibility and cost-savings cloud services offer. But despite adoption levels growing rapidly over the past few years, it is only recently that the legal sector has begun to give cloud services serious consideration.
Due to the very nature of law firms, the storage of sensitive information in an external environment has naturally been met with some caution. While early-movers have been experimenting with cloud services for some time now, the majority of the …
VMware jumps in with disaster recovery service for hybrid cloud set
Virtualisation giant VMware has announced ‘VMware vCloud Hybrid Service – Disaster Recovery’, a service which provides a continuously available recovery site if a VMware data centre hits the skids.
The system, which promises an RPO (recovery point objective) of 15 minutes, offers 1 terabyte of storage from a minimum pricing point of $835 a month, with the service available in all five of VMware’s vCloud Hybrid Service data centres in the US and UK.
The overall effect is that VMware has joined the disaster recovery game head first, with the virtualisation biz offering ease of access, security and cost with ‘a simple, automated process for replicating and recovering critical applications and data in a warm standby environment at a fraction of the cost of duplicating infrastructure or maintaining an active tertiary data centre.’
“We continue to aggressively execute our hybrid cloud vision, delivering capabilities like DR that businesses can use …