Contents

Calculating license demand

Summary

You may want to find out the quantity of licenses you would need to purchase or submit into AppClarity in order to make your product compliant. App Clarity provides license demand calculation reports that perform complex licensing calculations to find out what your ideal licensing position should be.

The complex server licensing covers four major reports of different vendors, for the most used and most expensive forms of licensing that occur in customer environments:

  • Microsoft Core License Demand
  • IBM Processor Value Unit (PVU) License Demand
  • Oracle Processor License Demand
  • Red Hat Socket Demand.
From AppClarity 7.1 the Microsoft Core License Demand report includes Windows Server OS licensing because it is core-based, and therefore it is now included in our Microsoft Core License Demand. In previous versions of AppClarity you could only view the core license demand for SQL Server.

To view and refresh these reports the logged-in user must have any of the user roles:

License Demand Calculation Report (LDC) pageRole
View a License Demand Calculation (LDC) pages

Global Administrator
Compliance Administrator
Compliance Viewer
Refresh a License Demand Calculation (LDC) ReportGlobal Administrator
Compliance Administrator

Refer to AppClarity user roles for more information about Role Based Access Controls (RBAC) in AppClarity. In future versions of AppClarity we plan to extend the number of vendors and products available. This example focuses on the Microsoft Core License Demand report.

On this page:

Calculating license demand

To calculate the license demand, you need to refresh the report you are interested in. In our example we have refreshed all three reports.

The License Demand Compliance (LDC) reports do not take into account any current entitlements set in AppClarity. They are purely for the purpose of determining the overall number of license units that would be required to make the installations compliant. In effect, the LDC reports answer the following question:

If you currently had no licenses how many licenses, in the most efficient arrangement, would you need to procure in order to become compliant?

To run and view License Demand Compliance (LDC) reports :

  1. Switch to AppClarity→License Demand.

  2. On the License Demand Calculation Report screen, select your compliance repository from the dropdown list.
  3. Click Refresh for each report.
  4. Once the report refresh shows as complete, click View Report.

The displayed summary table lists Licensed Software, the total number of Installs, License Demand and Unknown Installs. You also have the option to select one or multiple titles and then clicking Show Detailed Report to further explore and filter the number of selected titles.

Summary table

At the top of the page is a summary, where the primary bit of information is what AppClarity has estimated as the license demand. This appears under the License Demand column for each product.

The example shows the Microsoft Core License Demand for SQL Server (for Standard and Enterprise editions) displaying the unknown (or unparented) installation for its components, for example Reporting Services and Analysis Services.

In the example, both the  SQL Server Integration Services  and  SQL Server Reporting Services  show 0 Installs  and 248  and 67   Unknown Installs  respectively:

  • SQL Server Enterprise - License Demand indicates you would need to buy 1,310 cores licenses to be compliant
  • SQL Server Standard - License Demand indicates you would need to buy 970 cores licenses to be compliant.

The example also shows the Microsoft Core License Demand for Windows Server Enterprise and Windows Server Standard, for this calculation:

  • Windows Server Enterprise - License Demand indicates that you would need to buy 4,192 cores licenses to be compliant
  • Windows Server Standard - License Demand indicates that you would need to buy 24,130 cores licenses to be compliant.

This value is calculated by incorporating all the licensing schemes for SQL Server and Windows Server that Microsoft provides in order to derive the most efficient value. Clicking on one of these values will take you to the rows in the detailed table displaying the installations on devices.

Please note, there are some common reasons why Unknown Installs prevent License Demand from being calculated:

  • The host information is unknown to AppClarity
  • The hardware information (i.e. no of cores) is unknown to AppClarity
  • Any SQL Server component (For example, SQL Server Integration Services or Reporting Services) does not have a parent installation on any device (i.e. on any device, only the component is installed, and SQL Server installation is missing).

Microsoft Core License Demand

Detailed Report table

In the rest of the report, a table is displayed where each row shows the installation for the product on a particular device (Physical servers, physical host with VM's or Clusters). The License Demand value for each Machine Name row in the table is added together to form the summary License Demand value. The table is sorted by the different Licensed Software column.

The rows in the table are also organized into clusters containing Physical Host containing the physical hosts and the virtual guests they are hosting. It is important to see this relationship as this can sometimes make a significant difference to the license requirements. The table also shows the hardware information which again can make a difference to the license requirements.

From AppClarity 7.1 you can refresh reports from individual AppClarity screens as well as using the Settings App. You can do this by using the refresh icon next to the Last Refreshed box, for example:

Report refresh control

For a complete list of the specific reports you can run from particular pages refer to Running your first Compliance License Summary: Refresh Reports.


You can choose which columns are displayed in Inventory and AppClarity detail tables to increase readability. On pages where you can pick the displayed columns you'll see a new control like the one highlighted below:

Column Picker

To find out more about this feature refer to Running your first Compliance License Summary: Choosing the columns to display in reports.

Detailed report table


From AppClarity 7.1 entries in the Machine Name column are now links to the corresponding Device Summary for that machine in the Inventory app.

In our example by clicking on ACME-SQL01 in the Machine Name column we can view the machine's associated Device Summary in Inventory→Hardware→Device.

Device Summary Page

To automatically refresh a report for a repository you can set up a schedule:

  1. Under the Settings→Configuration→Schedules and click Add.
  2. In the Add schedule screen for:
    1. Schedule name - enter a logical name for the new schedule.
    2. Repository - select your repository from the dropdown menu.
    3. Action type - select the associated action type you want to schedule.
    4. Frequency - select the frequency.
For any entitlement repository, when a new entitlement is created (which triggers an entitlement consolidation) a Schedule called EntitlementConsolidationScheduler is created for this repository by default, it's set to run on a 24 hrs frequency (daily basis).