Powerpath licenseing on Microsoft Clusters

I was told that we required one license per physical host. So all of our cluster nodes (two and four node, active/active and active/active/active/passive) have individual licenses.

Yeah, I was afraid of that. We currently are going thru a "trueing up" of our licensing so we'll be putting dollars into the EMC bucket soon.

Thanks for the response.
Harold

hmm ..i was told it was by CPU ..we had to buy 16 CPU license for our HPUX Superdome.

Maybe it is different depending on the tier of the system? Most of our cluster nodes are HP DL585s with 4 AMD dual core processors. Granted these are still off the shelf single application servers compared with your superdome with what up to 64 processors and 48 i/o slots or something like that? You know EMC can't let you slide with one license for that beast.

Powerpath Licensing:
You need Powerpath if you want more than just failover; in one (or two) word(s): load balancing.
So every cluster node need a powerpath license no matter if it is active or passive.
Powerpath Licences are tiered based on the cpu sockets (not cores! -> I asked an EMC guy):
1-2 Sockets Powerpath Workgroup
3-7 Sockets Powerpath Departmental
8+ Sockets Powerpath Enterprise

For the differences between the functionality isself there it is a littlebit confusion:
-) Powerpath Basic: formerly known as Utility Kit Powerpath or Utility Kit -> basic failover
-)Powerpath Base: you have two HBAs and you only want to have failover and no loadbalancing -> very, very seldom
-) Powerpath Enterprise: you can have load balancing

If you install powerpath and you don't have a license you have "Powerpath Basic" with license you have "Powerpath Enterprise".

So be careful one is the functionality an the other one is the licensing tier-based!!
On the offer you'll always have the tier-based information.

best Regards
Manfred

Basic failover, i.e. no license, is failover using ONE hba from one port on an SP or FA to another port on an SP or FA only. You cannot use two HBAs.

The base license cost is the same as the Enterprise - Workgroup (two cpu sockets) license, so there is no reason to buy base. I don't even know why they sell it.