VMware licensing management – a proposal for change
A couple of weeks ago I talked to a co-worker who is responsible for selling VMware licenses and other VMware related stuff. As a VMware partner it isn’t always easy to manage the licenses for customers nor selling or upgrading their licenses if they bought them from another partner in the past.
A lot of the times multiple people register VMware licenses. For example, if I am the person that has to request or register licenses I probably will do it with my own VMware account. If I leave the company the licenses still are connected to me as a person. I know you can use a general account and register your licenses with that, but that goes against anything I ever learnt about security and identity management.
If you already have licenses there is also no easy way to ‘push’ them to another account, for example a general account. You can do this through the support desk, but takes all kinds of effort.
From a viewpoint of the license admininstrator it’s hard to keep track of all licenses that a company has for VMware products.
What I would like to see is a licensing portal with the following characteristics:
- You can register a company that becomes owner of the licenses it buys
- You can register as an employee for that company
- As a employee you register licenses for your company or for personal use
- Employees have the possibility to ‘push’ licenses from personal to corporate
- If you buy licenses with your partner you give your corporate ID so that any new licenses or grant numbers are placed under your company
- As a license admininstrator you can grant persons or partners the opportunity to view your licenses
Not that I want to make VMware the problem owner, but it would definitely make the whole job of license management a lot easier in my opinion.
By the way: Just do a search and replace of VMware by any other product vendor and I think my points are still valid.
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Arne Brucker
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Ronny Steiner
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Mike Horwath
