Abstract
Server consolidation and virtualization have become an integral part of IT planning to reduce TCO cost and ensure the high availability for customer, enlarge the flexibility to computing resource in today' enterprise data centers. In spite of having the variety advantages of server consolidation and virtualization, they cause many problems such as the software licensing issues, virtual server sprawl, network complexity issues, hardware start-up costs, and failover costs. In particular, software licensing problem brings about the serious results in operating of data center and also presents a significant challenge to virtualization because many vendors have realized that licensing policies applicable to physical systems are not compatible with virtual machines. So, the IT planers must be considering this problem before they conducts the server consolidation and virtualization. In this paper, we proposed the efficiency strategy of SW licensing for server consolidation and virtualization analyzing the N-Datacenter case in Korea. As a result, we suggest the two strategies as technical and management/contract aspect. First, as the technical aspect, we propose i) the adaptation of suitable licensing for virtualization, ii) differentiation of license according to the characteristics of server, iii) the core distribution of licenses to minimizing. Second, as the management/contract aspect, we suggest following three things. i) The existing license agreement is changed to the right licensing for virtualization. ii) The license agreement is contracts the active focused. iii) When a new contract should be added to virtualization provisions.
