PlateSpin Recon provides several licensing options at the time of purchase. The license types cannot be combined. Licensing applies limits during inventory and monitoring, but not during discovery.
Based on their usage, PlateSpin Recon licenses are classified as follows:
Per Use licenses or Project Licenses limits the amount of time and the number of servers that can be monitored. For example, ten server-days allows monitoring one server for ten days or two servers for five days.
PlateSpin Recon 4 or later supports the Per Server licensing model. You cannot use Per Server licensing model for versions earlier than Recon 4. A Per Server license is tied to the monitoring of physical servers, virtual hosts, and VMs regardless of the operating system. It limits the number of workloads and virtual hosts that can be monitored at any point of time. Monitoring a server consumes one license irrespective of whether it is a virtual host or a workload.
If you have 15 Per Server licenses, you can monitor any combination of physical servers, virtual hosts, and VMs that totals up to 15 licenses.
For example:
8 physical servers and 7 virtual hosts
5 physical servers, 5 virtual hosts, and 5 VMs
5 virtual hosts and 10 VMs
15 physical servers
15 virtual hosts
15 VMs
Depending on whether you want to purchase a new Recon 4.2 license or upgrade an existing license, see the following scenarios:
Assume that at any point of time you need to monitor 2 physical servers and 3 virtual hosts with 4 VMs on each host. The number of PlateSpin Recon licenses required is calculated as follows:
For 2 physical servers: 2 licenses.
For 3 virtual hosts and all VMs hosted on them: (3+ (3*4)) = 15 licenses.
The total number of PlateSpin Recon licenses you require is 17.
If you upgrade to PlateSpin Recon 4.2, you can continue to use the existing Per Core licenses unless you require additional licenses. For information on the Per core license, see Section 3.1.3, Per Core Licenses.
If you require additional licenses, contact our Sales Support team.
Per Core Licenses are tied to physical cores for monitoring, regardless of the operating system, platform, or the number of servers involved. If you inventory both the host and the VMs, the PlateSpin Recon licenses are calculated based on the cores of the host only, and the virtual CPU count is ignored. If you inventory only the VMs and not the host, the PlateSpin Recon counts one core per one virtual CPU, and the licenses are consumed based on the number of virtual CPUs assigned to the VM.
For example, assume that you have two physical hosts, PH1 and PH2, in your network. PH1 has 2 cores and PH2 has 4 cores. Each host machine has 5 VMs running on it, and each VM has 2 vCPUs. Therefore, the total number of vCPUs on each physical host is 10 (5 VMs multiplied by 2 vCPUs). The total number of PlateSpin Recon licenses consumed is calculated as follows:
Scenario 1: If you inventory and monitor both physical hosts and VMs, the total number of PlateSpin Recon licenses consumed is the sum of the all cores of PH1 and PH2. Therefore, the total number of PlateSpin licenses consumed is 6 (2 cores of PH1 + 4 cores of PH2).
Scenario 2: If you inventory and monitor PH1 and the VMs of PH2, the total number of PlateSpin Recon licenses consumed is the sum of the all cores of PH1 and all vCPUs on PH2. Therefore, the total number of PlateSpin licenses consumed is 12 (2 cores of PH1 + 10 vCPUs of PH2).
For more information about Virtual Center licensing, see Virtual Center
in the PlateSpin Recon 4.2 User Guide.