Methods and systems to determine application license costs in a virtualized data center

Patent metadata

Field	Value
Publication number	US-2016371109-A1
Application number	US-201514822914-A
Country	US
Kind code	A1
Filing date	Aug 11, 2015
Priority date	Jun 16, 2015
Publication date	Dec 22, 2016
Grant date	—

Abstract

Methods and systems to compute application license costs of a number of applications run on virtual machines of a virtualized data center are described. In one aspect, one or more of the virtual machines (“VMs”) that form the virtual data center are determined. Each VM is created from hardware components specifications of one or more application blueprints stored in a data-storage devices. The one or more blueprints are searched to determine the one more applications that run in each VM. For each VM, a total VM application licensing cost of the one or more applications is computed based on one or more of an application instance license cost, application socket license cost, and application core license of each of the one or more applications associated with each application.

First claim

What is claimed is:

1 . A method stored in one or more data-storage devices and executed using one or more processors of a computing environment to compute application license cost in a physical data center, the method comprising:
determining one or more virtual machines (“VMs”) that form a virtual data center that runs in a physical data center; and for each VM,
determining one or more application blueprints stored in the one or more data-storage devices and used to create the VM,
determining one or more applications that run in the VM based on the one or more application blueprints,
computing a total VM application licensing cost of the one or more applications based on one or more of an application instance license cost, application socket license cost, and application core license of each of the one or more applications, and
storing the total VM application licensing, cost in the one or more data-storage devices.

2 . The method of claim 1 , further comprising computing a total application license cost as a sum of the total VM application licensing cost computed for each VM.

3 . The method of claim 1 , further comprising:
computing wastage of the one or more application license costs; and generating an alert when the wastage is greater than a wastage threshold.

4 . The method of claim 3 , wherein computing the wastage further comprises:
for each of the one or more applications,
determining application license cost paid for each of the one or more applications,
computing actual utilization license cost for each of the one or more applications,
computing a difference between the application license cost paid and the actual utilization license cost; and
summing the difference for each of the one or more applications to generate the wastage.

5 . The method of claim 1 , wherein computing the total VM application license cost further comprises:
for each application,
when the application has an instance license, computing the instance license cost based on one of number of virtual central processing units (“vCPUs”) of the VM and number of application users,
when the application has a socket license, computing the socket license cost based on number of sockets of a server computer used to run the VM, and
when the application has a core license, computing the core license cost based on the number of cores of the server computer used to run the VM.

6 . The method of claim 5 , wherein computing the instance license cost further comprises:
for each vCPU license,
determining vCPU license cost from a general ledger, and
determining a vCPU multiplying factor based on the number of vCPUs;
for each user license,
determining user license cost from the general ledger, and
determining a user multiplying factor based on the number of vCPUs; and
summing a product of the vCPU license cost and the vCPU multiplying factor and a product of the user license cost and the user multiplying factor, for each vCPU license and user license.

7 . The method of claim 5 , wherein computing the socket license cost further comprises:. determining a number of sockets of processors server computer;
for each socket license,
determining application license cost per socket from a general ledger,
computing a host application license cost as a product of the application license cost per socket and the number of sockets, and
determining a CPU proportion factor based a number of vCPUs used by the VM to a total number of vCPUs of the one or more VMs that run the application; and
summing a product the host application license cost and the CPU proportion for each socket license.

8 . The method of claim 5 , wherein computing the core license cost further comprises determining a number of cores of processors server computer:
for each core license,
determining application license cost per core from a general ledger,
computing a host application license cost as a product of the application license cost per core and the number of cores, and
determining a CPU proportion factor based a number of vCPUs used by the VM to a total number of vCPUs of the one or more VMs that run the application; and
summing a product the host application license cost and the CPU proportion for each core license.

9 . The method of claim 1 , further comprises:
moving one of the one or more VMs from a server computer to a second server computer when one of the application socket license cost and application core license cost is lower for the second server computer; and not moving one of the one or more VMs from a server computer to a second server computer when one of the application socket license cost and application core license cost is higher for the second server computer

10 . The method of claim 1 , further comprises determining not to consolidate VMs to a lower number of server computers when the total VM license cost is greater than power cost to run the VMs on the lower number of server computers.

11 . A computer system comprising:
one or more processors; one or more data-storage devices; and machine-readable instructions stored in the data-storage devices and executed using the one or more processors, the machine-readable instructions
determining one or more virtual machines (“VMs”) that form a virtual data center that runs in a physical data center; and
for each VM,
determining one or more application blueprints stored in the one or more data-storage devices and used to create the VM,
determining one or more applications that run in the VM based on the one or more application blueprints,
computing a total VM application licensing cost of the one or more applications based on one or more of an application instance license cost, application socket license cost, and application core license of each of the one or more applications, and
storing the total VM application licensing cost in the one or more data-storage devices.

12 . The computer system of claim 11 , further comprising computing a total application license cost as a sum of the total VM application licensing cost computed for each VM.

13 . The computer system of claim 11 , further comprising:
computing wastage of the one or more application license costs; and generating an alert when the wastage is greater than a wastage threshold.

14 . The computer system of claim 13 , wherein computing the wastage further comprises:
for each of the one or more applications,
determining application license cost paid for each of the one or more applications,
computing actual utilization license cost for each of the one or more applications,
computing a difference between the application license cost paid and the actual utilization license cost; and
summing the difference for each of the one or more applications to generate the wastage.

15 . The computer system of claim 11 , wherein Computing the total VM application license cost further comprises:
for each application,
when the application has an instance license, computing the instance license cost based on one of number of virtual central processing units (“vCPUs”:) of the VM and number of application users,
when the application has a socket license, computing the socket license cost based on number of sockets of a server computer used to run the VM, and
when the application has a core license, computing the core license cost based on the number of cores of the server computer used to run the VM.

16 . The computer system of claim 15 , wherein computing the instance license cost further comprises:
for each vCPU license,
determining vCPU li

Assignees

• Vmware Inc

Inventors

• Palavalli Amarnath
• Gaurav Kumar
• Dhankani Nikhil
• Sathyamurthy Dattathreya
• Singh Servesh

Classifications

• G06F2009/4557

  Distribution of virtual machine instances; Migration and load balancing · CPC title

• G06F9/45558 Primary

  Hypervisor-specific management and integration aspects · CPC title

• G06Q30/04

  Billing or invoicing · CPC title