Comments on: Red Hat subscriptions on a VMware infrastructure

By: TheBadMan

TheBadMan — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 01:27:19 +0000

Is this VMWare specific or does the same licensing model apply to XenServer and Hyper-V?

By: Edwin Weijdema

Edwin Weijdema — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 12:01:09 +0000

Hi John, what you state is correct. If you have VMware as the hypervisor platform you use special subscription options. If you want to do a V2P for testing purposes within 30 days you don’t have to buy additional subscriptions. If you do want to keep the physical machine running with a Red Hat Enterprise Linux version, you will need to buy an extra subscription.

Red Hat uses subscription units to charge you for your use of the software:
“Subscription Units: We charge you a fee on a per “Unit” basis for our Subscription Services. For example, Software Subscriptions for Red Hat Enterprise Linux are sold based on the number of “Systems” on which you install the Software.” http://www.redhat.com/f/pdf/licenses/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Agreement_UK_Web.pdf – see page 6 for this

A nice to know subject is the following:
Note that a Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription is not version specific. Once a subscription has been purchased, customers are free to run any version.
http://www.redhat.com/f/pdf/rhel/rhel5_overview.pdf (page 14) or http://www.redhat.com/licenses/ and http://www.redhat.com/licenses/rhn.html

So bottom line: if you do a V2P and will let the machine running on physical you will need to purchase a Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription if the physical servers has max. 2 CPUs or use the Red Hat Enterprise Linux AP platform if it has more then 2 CPUs.

If you want to buy a single subscription for a VM running on VMware it is possible if you just buy a Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription (but the physical underlying ESX server must not have more then 2 CPUs and the ESX server is not situated inside a VMware cluster)

Hope that helps a bit, if you have more questions please let me know.

By: John

John — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 09:17:40 +0000

From talking to Redhat: RHEL for VMWare (AP or not) can _ONLY_ be run as a VM and _CANNOT_ be used for a physical instance. So if we want to do a V2P then the instance will become unsubscribed (theoretically at least)… We were also told that we could not by a single subscription for a VM… Do we need to counsel our rep???

By: Viperian

Viperian — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 15:03:43 +0000

No, if you purchase 10 times a “Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform with Unlimited Socket – 10 Guest for VMware” you will have a subscription for 100 virtual machines running RHEL who may move between all physical ESX servers. Also you have covered 10 Physical ESX servers in a cluster then.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 14:42:16 +0000

Hi,

So are you saying you need to purchase 3 SKUs of “Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform with Unlimited Socket – 10 Guest for VMware
x 10″ to acheive license coverage (and migration rights) of unlimited RHEL instances on your host?