How Do I Understand How Entitlements Are Determined?
Entitlements start with a license purchase. Purchasing a license grants you a right to run the licensed software. The number of copies you can run is usually tied to the purchase quantity. It gets more complicated when upgrades and downgrades enter the picture. Before proceeding, you may want to review the following examples:
- Example: Downgrade Entitlements
- Example: Upgrade and Downgrade Entitlements
- Example: How Can a License Have a Deficit and a Surplus at the Same Time?
- Examples: SQL Server Licensing
- Examples: Windows Server Licensing
Compliance Rules
The general rules of compliance are:
- The number of installations of a title cannot exceed the number of entitlements.
- The number of entitlements is never greater than the number of licenses purchased.
How Installations Are Determined
Determining compliance means comparing:
- How many entitlements do I have?
- How many installations are there when compared with those entitlements?
So how does License Analytics manage entitlements and installations when comparing them?
- License channel: Every installation has a license channel; so does every entitlement.
- Contract: Every installation is to a machine. Every machine belongs to at least one group. Every purchase is related to a contract. Every contract is related to some set of groups.
- Title: Every purchase and installation is of a particular software title. Every title is uniquely identifiable.
- Virtual machine guests: When running "more capable" editions of Windows Server and SQL Server, some VM guest installations are granted licenses by the host.