Roy Heaton
CTO, Inuvika
An important task, for any IT department, is to manage and monitor application software licenses. This ensures that the company is compliant and also optimizes license costs by purchasing the number of licenses that are actually required. A virtualized environment allows the IT department to centralize the management of software applications as well as other IT resources and assets. In order for IT personnel to be able to manage application software licenses effectively, it is imperative that the virtualization platform provide an easy to use mechanism for managing the allocation of software licenses to users. It also needs to provide metrics about which users have access to each application and metrics on the actual usage of those applications.
The Inuvika OVD Enterprise application virtualization platform provides a complete software application license management system. It seamlessly integrates with the application publication mechanism to make the allocation of application software licenses an integral part of the publication process. This means that whenever a user is given access to an application through the publishing mechanism, a software license is automatically allocated for that user. Equally, if the user has access to an application removed as a result of a modification made to the publication, the application software license is freed up for another user. The IT Administrator need only create the software license assets for each application which define the number of licenses available, the expiry date, the type of license and other related data such as cost and license keys. OVD Enterprise will alert the IT Administrator if the number of allocated licenses reach a certain threshold or are about to expire.
This approach makes application software license allocation extremely easy for the IT Administrator. In fact, the IT Administrator never has to allocate a license explicitly to a user. It is handled by Inuvika OVD through the publication mechanism. This is true whether users and user groups are defined in the internal OVD database or in an external directory. The centralization of license data for the application software licenses also creates a central repository for this data. This makes the maintenance of license data much easier.
Inuvika OVD Enterprise also collects metrics on application usage, independent of whether a software license has been defined for that application. Any time a user runs an OVD published application, OVD Enterprise captures the length of time that the application is run.
Together with the reporting capabilities provided for application software license management, this data provides insight into published application usage by tracking usage by user, user group, server and the amount of time an application was active. This data may be further analyzed for compliance, license allocation or cost allocation purposes. Detailed reports by application, user, groups or server are available to identify licensing needs and report on current license availability.
Detailed Feature Set
The Software License Management component within Inuvika OVD Enterprise provides the following capabilities:
- Asset Management: System Administrators can manage data related to the software licenses for a software application
- License Allocation: OVD Enterprise automatically allocates a license to a user who is authorized to access the application as defined by the application publications within OVD and keeps the license allocations up to date if the publication data changes. The current status can be reported
- Application and License Usage: OVD Enterprise collects and stores application usage data and provides reporting capabilities to view the data
- Notifications: provides the ability to send alert emails when certain conditions exist such as license expiry or over-allocation
Summary
The Inuvika OVD Software License Management provides an easy to use, low touch mechanism to manage application software license assets, license compliance and cost allocation. It allows System Administrators to determine which applications are actually used by which users and tune the software licenses required accordingly.
With notifications based on configured license threshold levels or expiry dates, IT personnel can proactively manage application delivery capacity, their license requirements and track consumption to ensure compliance and allocation of costs.