OVS and System Center (again)

[CAWJames]

Morning all,

 

Just asked for a quote for System Center to cover our site.

 

I was expecting a price in the hundreds, after reading other peoples posts, but alas it was multiple thousands a year.

 

We were quoted for OVSEnt E SysCtrMgmtSteEnt LicSAPk OLV E 1Y Acad AP for all FTE.

 

Is this the right product to ask for to get System Center for all servers and devices? Is there a better way to licence it?

 

We are trying to beat our symantec endpoint quote and add some centralized management basically.

 

Thanks

 

James

[Achandler]

Are you a school?

 

MUY-00928 SysCtrMgmtSteEnt ALNG LicSAPk OLV E 1Y Acdmc AP

 

Is the code I was given by a licensing person at a respectable company just last week, priced at about £60 this includesw the following:

 

• System Center Configuration Manager Server ML - Enterprise

• System Center Data Protection Manager Server ML - Enterprise

• System Center Operations Manager Server ML - Enterprise

• System Center Service Manager Server ML - Enterprise

• System Center Virtual Machine Manager Server ML - Enterprise

 

Management server licenses and software are included for the following:

• System Center Data Protection Manager 2010

• System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2

 

So these include Management licenses for SCCM but not all of SCCM itself, only 2 server license parts, so I also added:

 

J3A-00692 SysCtrCnfgMgrSvr ALNG LicSAPk OLV E 1Y Acdmc AP

 

Which set me back another £35 and I am hoping is all correct. I believe you need the first pack 1 per physical server.

 

Edit: Please note these are annual subscriptions.

[CAWJames]

Thanks for that, around 60 is what we are quoted.

 

We are a college

 

I was hoping it would beat the symantec quote, but it is five times larger!

 

Back to the drawing board

 

James

[Achandler]

Then i shall tell you we are paying £54,

 

So Symantec is charging you £10 per server for all there management stuff?

 

As I am under the impression that that pack is needed per Server not per Employee. As your CALs for it are included within the Desktop Enterprise Pack.

[CAWJames]

Symantec are charging around 6 quid to renew existing and around 15 to add a licence. This is for their protection suite enterprise, 1 licence for all devices and comes with the management interface, ant-spam and a few other bits and pieces. This is for approx 240 machines, even split renew to new.

 

James

[Achandler]

We are a school with 90 staff, 6 physical servers.

 

We have bought

90 2UJ-00007 DsktpEdu ALNG LicSAPk OLV E 1Y Acdmc Ent EntCAL

6 MUY-00928 SysCtrMgmtSteEnt ALNG LicSAPk OLV E 1Y Acdmc AP

1 J3A-00692 SysCtrCnfgMgrSvr ALNG LicSAPk OLV E 1Y Acdmc AP

 

This allow me (as far an my discussion with a licensing person) to use SCCM on all my Desktops and Servers. because the Client CALs are in the Enterprise Bundle (which you probably buy anyway, this would include Forefront to for Anti-Spam) and then your Server CALs are £54 per physical server.

 

I can't really see how Symantec is cheaper, but then I dont't have the full price worked otu for myself.

[CAWJames]

We currently dont buy any cal packs, as we already had a pool for most of what we needed.

 

Why cant Ms make the SKU's readable in english! no idea what those mean.

 

James

[Achandler]

Oh well then yes, it would be way more expensive to get SCCM. We pay around £4k a year for everything.

[CAWJames]

Right ok, going to take a different tack on this now.

 

I have asked for quotes to give us the desktop pack, maybe enterprise, not sure yet, but trying to beat the hooded claw(Nasty Norton disguised as benevolent Symantec) at renewal costs. So trying to get Forefront instead of Endpoint. This will also give us all the CALS for System Center.

 

So..If we end up licencing the Enterprise Desktop, what licences would I need to cover SCCM(and maybe SCVMM), or the whole suite as 2012 is all or nothing?

 

Any definitive answers, as i've read statements of the "whole suite for £100" and "cost us peanuts", etc. I am assuming these people don't have to FTE the suite, as the CALS are covered by the Desktop suite, and they just need SC server licences as an 'additional product'?

 

I am loathed to spend 6-7k on 3 years AV renewal, when I can roll everything into the EES/OVS-ES and get so much more out.

 

1 year AV renewal plus what we pay already on OVS-ES for Office 2010, WinSVRCAL and ExchangeSTDCAL, comes to a pretty penny anyway, might as well put it to good use. 80 FTE on EES vs 300 devices on AV. I reckon my yearly budget would be around 4-5k with AV and current EES spend all rolled in, that should cover it all shouldn't it? The way our reseller wanted us to do it with an FTE count for the suite would have been 5k on top of current EES spend, Desktop suite has got to be the way to go.

 

Does this make sense or is the licensing part of my brain on the blink again? It works in my head! Must be the working in a college which is 99% female, staff and students!

 

thanks again,

 

James

 

ps. I also meddle with landrovers as a hobby, that I can give advice on, even if I can't help others in licensing matters!

[Achandler]

Ok.

 

For Forefront you need to get the Enterprise Desktop CAL from what I remember reading, this same CAL does your SCCM for your desktops. About £40 per FTE.

 

The servers then need a Management License each, they are about £50, This Management CAL includes the licenses to install, SCVMM and DPM but nothing else.

 

To license other parts of SCCM you need to buyt them seperaely, although when SCCM 2012 is released this must be changing as that is 1 whole suite. My license for SCCM was something like £40.

 

I'm not entirely sure if there is a small license fee for the Forefrotn Server or something as well as I don't use it., but it won't be much if there is.

[CAWJames]

Ok, this is all making some sense!

 

I need the Enterprise Desktop platform for all FTE, to replace our current OVS Office, Exchange CAL and WinSvr CAL. This should give us CAL coverage for SC as well, plus complete Forefront, server, client and Exchange spam. Average price around £40 each.

 

Question, does this give us Windows 7 Pro or Enterprise? The partner website says upgrade rights to Enterprise, but I don't see why you would want Pro when you can get Enterprise. Or is Enterprise MDOP only?

 

10 x SysCtrMgmtSteEnt ALNG LicSAPk OLV E 1Y Acdmc AP - 1 for each server we want to cover, this includes 3 R710's with Windows Server 2008R2 with Hyper-V, all looking after 3 or 4 Windows Server Standard VM's.(dont you just love putting 36GB RAM in a server, that used to be the size of a standard SCSI hard drive!!) Or do I need to increase the number of licences to cover the Virtuals too? So around 20 of? Average price around £55 each.

 

1 x SysCtrCnfgMgrSvr ALNG LicSAPk OLV E 1Y Acdmc AP - For the actual server running System Center. Around £40 average.

 

This I assume would give us full coverage for SCCM, SCVMM and SCDPM then?

 

I am doing my sums, and projected yearly spend is only £400 odd more a year, but gives us Windows 7(and then 8)rights to all XP and Vista machines not covered by other upgrade means, plus the full CAL pack and most of SC.

 

I'm still waiting for the exact prices to come back from RM, but looking good so far, and won't cost us £9k in the first year!(If we 3 year the Symantec and pay our normal OVS bill)

 

Now what happens when SC2012 comes out with its bundle model? How would SA work? Would we only be able to use the already licensed parts, or access to whole suite?

 

Thanks for the replies

 

James

[Soulfish]

System Center management packs work in a similar way to other MS licenses where you can get Enterprise and Datacenter versions. Enterprise covers you for the physical box and upto 4 virtual machines, where as Datacenter covers you for unlimited VMs but you have to license all physical CPUs in the physical server. For most people running >4 VMs per server (where each server has 2 CPUs) the best option is to purchase two licenses of System Center Server Management Suite Datacenter license at around £30/license.

 

This gives you the ML licenses (think of them as CALs for servers!) for all of the system center products, and the server license for SCVMM. You then need to license the enterprise desktop pack (as you've already indicated) to give you the System Center Client Management Suite, giving the client management licenses for all of your computers. Finally you need to purchase the server licenses for the components your interested in, typically at around £30/server.

 

For SC2012 however everything changes. There are only two suites available (and you have to buy a suite to license anything) - System Center 2012 Datacenter and System Center 2012 Standard. SC2012 datacenter provides licenses for unlimited VM OSEs (operating system environments), includes ALL system center server licenses (AND the SQL licenses for them) AND provides 2 physical processor licenses. SC2012 standard provides access to ALL system center licenses (AND SQL licenses), but only provides management licenses for 2 OSEs and 2 physical processors.

 

The SA upgrade rights require 2 SC2011DC licenses to convert to 1 SC2012DC license, where as 1 SC2011 Enterprise license gives you 2 SC2012 Standard licenses. The enterprise CAL suite (included in the enterprise desktop pack) continues to provide client MLs for all SC products.

System Center 2012 is a lot easier to license, but no idea what the EES/OVS pricing is going to look like! Have a look at http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/1/1/11128EC7-2BE7-480C-9D46-4ECECA9E481A/System%20Center%202012%20Licensing%20Datasheet.pdf for more info.

 

Finally to answer your other question - Windows 7 Enterprise is only available as an upgrade option. You have to have a qualifying OS already installed on the hardware your install W7 Ent onto, but yes it is included in the Enterprise desktop pack.

[CAWJames]

Right! Just when you thought it was safe to come out of the kitchen!

 

We have 3 virtual hosts, all R710's, 2 with a single processor and one with dual. So 4 datacenter licenses to cover them, plus an enterprise for each of the others, so 7 enterprise, 4 datacenter to cover the 10 servers. Sound about right?

 

If we wanted to licence SCCM, SCDPM and SCVMM, that would be 2 server licences needed for the management servers, 1 for SCCM and another for a standalone SCDPM server, and as SCVMM is included we dont need a seperate license for it, we can just run that on the same server as SCCM?

 

In the case of 2012, our 7 enterpise and 4 dc, would transfer to 14 standard 2012 and 2 datacenter, meaning we would just need an extra 2 datacenter added on? or could we use the 4 extra standards to cover the single processor virtual hosts?

 

Thanks for the clarification, its appreciated.

 

James

[Soulfish]

Sounds about right, but be careful with using anything other than Datacenter for virtual hosts. One of the reasons for using Datacenter is that you can only reassign licenses every 90 days. This means that if your using live migration/HA or anything else like that for the servers running Standard you can only move/shift VMs around every 90 days.

 

Since OVS/EES is a yearly scheme anyway you wouldn't really need to worry about things until next year when you'd renew with 7 standard 2012 and 3 datacenter 2012

[CAWJames]

Excellent, the fogs are clearing, making sense now.

 

We are planning a DR suite, which is why all this is coming in, so while we shouldn't need to migrate VM's all the time, part of the strategy is that we have an offsite virtual host that will come into play if the main site goes down, not zero downtime, but the ability to get things up and running fairly quickly at the DR site if needed. Hopefully DPM will keep the offsite VM's up to date, and ready to be brought up when needed. Although i'm still working on how im going to do that, and if DPM can keep offline VM's updated from an online one at another site. Will probably just have a DPM server at the DR site, and retrieve the VM's from strorage if needed. Good job I have multiple 10's of TB's of DAS at each site!

 

On another note, anyone know if the enterprise CAL suite is available seperately from the desktop platform and how much that would be per FTE? I've got to sell this to the powers that be, and I may not be able to get the whole desktop platform passed this year until Windows 8 is finalised and them sold on it.

 

Thanks again

 

James

[CAWJames]

Ok an update,

 

After intense toing and froing with our reseller, we have licensed our college for SCCM, SCOM, SCDPM and SCVMM plus the full enterprise desktop platform for around 5k a year, on OVS-ES.

 

Over 3 years, it will cost us around £800 more in total to do this than have Symantec Protection suite for all our computers.

 

In my eyes(and SMT's), paying 7k for 3 years for what in reality is just one product(ok, SPS does have antispam and a few other technologies, but really it's just client AV) against the 5k a year for a whole range of software and technologies is something of a win!(bearing in mind we have 2k a year of OVS-ES anyway)

 

80 OVSEntE DsktpEdu ALNG LicSAPk OLV E 1Y INS EntCAL - Enterprise Desktop Platform(FTE)

 

10 OVSEnt E SysCtrMgmtSteEnt LicSAPk OLV E 1Y Acad AP - ServerML(Server count)

 

1 OVSAdd E SysCtrCnfgMgrSvr LicSAPk OLV E 1Y AP - Management server license for SCCM

 

1 OVSAdd E SysCtrOpsMgrSvr ALNG LicSAPk OLV E 1Y AP - Management server license for SCOM

 

SCVMM and SCDPM Management server licences come as part of the CAL included in the Enterprise Desktop Platform/ServerML

 

We also have a few server licences, Exchange, SQL Proc license.

 

All in all not too bad!

 

Thanks for all your help, much appreciated.

(ps, I use an including VAT price mostly when saying figures)