Licensing and maintenance

[Optic_Nerve]

Hi,

Is there an easy way to track the maintenance on VC and ESX VI3-Enterprise licenses?

We purchased our VC license quite a while ago (back in the 2.x days), and we've purchased ESX licenses over time (18 CPUs worth in total now). Every time we purchase a new license, we buy it with maintenance. So when VC3/VI3 came out we were automatically entitled to all upgrades.

However, we have never received any kind of notification that maintenance is running out or expired. There doesn't appear to be a way to check this on the VMware licensing site either. We would happily continue to pay maintenance (probably forever), but nobody has ever sent us a bill and we haven't kept track of it ourselves. I am only new at this company and it is one of those things where the VM infrastructure has been put in by contractors over the last 2 years so it is very difficult to work it all out.

What is MEANT to happen when maintenance expires? Does VMware send notification and renewals? Is it meant to come from the reseller? In our case this would be an easy revenue stream for VMware - if we got a bill, we'd pay it! This is what happens with all our other licenses with maintenance plans (from other companies).

Is there a way to easily find out if we are still covered by maintenance? The VMware licensing site is a great way to see all the licenses we own, but there is no information about maintenance and expiry dates etc. If maintenance has expired, can be it started up again?

I suspect that our VC maintenance must have expired simply because I didn't automatically get a license for VM Converter 3.0. This is what has alerted me to the fact that we may not be covered for some of our licenses.

We would hate for a new version to come out (like VI4) and suddenly find we aren't eligible to upgrade. We want to pay for this, but it doesn't seem to be the easy, automatic process that it really should be (for us anyway).

Thanks for any help.

Regards,

Optic

[stvkpln · Accepted solution]

Generally, the inside sales team automatically sends a bill when renewal time comes up to whoever the licensing POC is. Your best bet is to get with your sales folks and figure out what's going on with your licensing and get it straightened out -- and probably get all of your licenses co-terminated so that you can renew everything at once on an annual basis!

[Optic_Nerve]

Hi diztored,

We've never received anything, and it seems that several of our licenses have expired.

Who do you normally receive the bill from? Is it VMware directly, or is it the reseller you initially purchased the license from? I am just wondering where the system has "broken down" for us.

As I said, we are more than happy to pay continual maintenance and it is annoying to find that it has lapsed with no visibility. Hopefully VMware can "backdate" our renewals to when they expired (Jan 2007) and we can pay a renewal until Jan 2008.

Cheers,

Optic

[Paul_B1]

We typically work through our reseller to keep track of our licensing and maint. agreements (part of the "value add" I suppose). We also make all of our maint. agreements co-terminus so they all expire at the same time, which makes it easy to track and cut PO's when the time comes.

If you talk to your reseller they can get a spreadsheet with all your licensing/maint agreements with all the info you need.

Message was edited by:

Paul.B

[bowulf]

Coming from someone who has had this nightmare, it is particularly egregious. We switched VARs, and no one was notifying us. We ended up have to get caught up as it was cheaper than re-purchasing the licenses by far. Since then we have co-terminated most of our licenses, but our new licenses have once again not been purchased to the new date.

It would be really nice for VMware to come to some sort of site license in regards to support with true up periods.

[Optic_Nerve]

Hi All,

Thanks for the replies. We don't really have a single reseller as such (some licenses were bought OEM with HP hardware, others from one reseller and others from another).

I contacted VMware and got an excellent reply with a quote to co-term all our licenses (including backdating for the expired maintenance).

It would still be great if maintenance type (gold or platinum) and expiry was listed in the licensing portal.

Regards,

Optic