SRM Licensing thoughts

So how does SRM licensing differ from regular VMWare licensing?  Well for a start SRM is licensed per CPU not per 2 CPUs like ESX.  It is also licensed only for the ‘Protected’ servers.  The project I’m currently working on has 4 ESX hosts in the Primary or Protected site and 4 ESX hosts in the Secondary or Recovery site.  Each of these hosts has 4 quad-core CPUS so I need 16 SRM CPU licenses and 1 SRM Server license on the Protected site and no additional licenses on the Recovery site.  These licenses are of course in addition to your normal ESX vCenter licenses.  This license model works for a typical uni-directional solution enabling Fail-over and Fail-back.  If say you had a site in London and another in Cambridge where they were each going to be able to Fail-over to the other site then you would need CPU licenses for both ends to enable Bi-directional Fail-over.

The next issue is now to install the licenses.  All of the documentation tells you to just add them to your existing license server.  Easy Peasy then!  Well most of us will be running a license server with only one license file for our hosts as this is the default.  So what do you do?  The VMWare licensing web site won’t allow you to combine the licenses into one file.  You can’t manually combine the files so you’re left with two license files.  If you look on the ‘Config Services’ tab in your license server you’ll see that the license file path points to your existing license file.  The trick is to change this to the directory where the license files reside.  There is an inportant caveat to this though.  Make sure you don’t put a trailing / on the end.  If you’ve followed the default installation then you need the location to be ‘C:Program FilesVMWareVMWare License ServerLicenses’  Once this is done then you can save the service, restart the license server and the re-read the license files.