[cisco-voip] Feature Request to fix Licensing issues with EM

Thu Sep 17 15:43:25 EDT 2015

my biggest issue when going from individual DLU to ELM was the fact that ELM was not able to "borrow" down, only up and when borrowing was triggered. i was at a Live session a number of years ago as ELM was being developed and they did their best to explain the borrowing, but i guess it didn't sink in. 

i honestly thought that if i had a thousand extra enhanced licenses and I assigned myself two devices, it would use two of those enhanced licenses. nope. it wants an enhanced plus. or better. 

had i known this, during the upgrade process, i would have chosen a different quantity of licenses as was the option then, then true up the support contracts at renewal. 

--- 
Lelio Fulgenzi, B.A. 
Senior Analyst, Network Infrastructure 
Computing and Communications Services (CCS) 
University of Guelph 

519‐824‐4120 Ext 56354 
lelio at uoguelph.ca 
www.uoguelph.ca/ccs 
Room 037, Animal Science and Nutrition Building 
Guelph, Ontario, N1G 2W1 

----- Original Message -----

From: "Anthony Holloway" <avholloway+cisco-voip at gmail.com> 
To: "Scott Voll" <svoll.voip at gmail.com> 
Cc: "Mamma Fulgenzi" <lelio at uoguelph.ca>, cisco-voip at puck.nether.net 
Sent: Thursday, September 17, 2015 3:33:42 PM 
Subject: Re: [cisco-voip] Feature Request to fix Licensing issues with EM 

It's funny that you have Lelio listed as Mamma in your email. 

First, and I'm really asking this, if you are 100% EM, then why would you put a username on a phone? It should be blank, and thus classified as a public space phone (known as Anonymous in later versions of CUCM). 

Second, I'm not going to pretend I understand Cisco's licensing migration process. I get burned every time. I think part of the confusion is that it's not automatic, and it's subjective. You can literally just argue your way to more licensing, making the LCU pointless. Granted, you'll shoot yourself in the foot when the maintenance bill comes, but it's possible nonetheless. 

Lastly, if this were a greenfield project, and you had 100 phones with 100% EM, then you would only need to buy 100 UCL Enhanced licenses to cover the phones themselves, and they would not have owner user IDs, just anonymous. Then, if you need your employees, say you had 100 also, to have iPad, iPhone, CSF, etc, you would need to buy another license for each user. To make it easy, say each person had three devices, then you'll need 100 CUWL Standard. So, at the end of the day, you end up with 200 licenses (100 UCL Enhanced + 100 CUWL Standard). However, if you wanted to play the licensing game, you would just not buy the 100 Enhanced, and assign each person a random phone, because their CUWL Standard would cover it. The negative is that the UCM User page, and their Jabber client on the PC/Mac, would show this random phone for them to manage. 

I think.... 

On Thu, Sep 17, 2015 at 1:55 PM, Scott Voll < svoll.voip at gmail.com > wrote: 

We are 100% EM in CM 8.6. Now I have to associate phones to Users so I can get the licensing that I have support on. 1000 users rather than 1600 phones. (450 are soft clients). Since I'm licensed for 1000 I have to "true up" my licensing ($24k). so if convert over to CUWL for 1000 why should I buy more licensing that I already have? thus working through the association of devices to users. 

So now I'm stuck in a Associating user / device nightmare. which I can work through. But now I have to keep my associations current moving forward (we move users often) so I don't get out of Licensing complainants again. 

Scott 

On Thu, Sep 17, 2015 at 11:44 AM, Anthony Holloway < avholloway+cisco-voip at gmail.com > wrote: 

<blockquote>

Can you briefly explain this EM licensing nightmare? I'm not sure I'm aware of it. 

Also, it sounds like what you are describing, implies that license compliance checks are run frequently and multiple times throughout the day, and to my knowledge they are not. How else would you keep up with all of the logging in and out of devices, unless the license compliance check was run in real time? Which was probably how it worked prior to ELM. Just spitballing a few ideas. 

On Thu, Sep 17, 2015 at 1:29 PM Scott Voll < svoll.voip at gmail.com > wrote: 

<blockquote>

OK, everyone has complained about the licensing nightmare that EM plays in CM 9 and 10. 

My coworker has come up with a fix...... 

In thinking this all through, I thought about how I would like it all to work mechanically. Here is what I would like to request as a Feature/Enhancement Request: 

When I log into a device for the first time with Extension Mobility, I am assigned as the device owner. That ownership is retained until one of two things happen: 

1. I log into another like device (i.e.: I have a 8861 at my desk, and I log into Scott’s 8861 at his desk) 

2. Someone else logged into my device. 

This way, the ownership of the device is always assigned by the extension mobility profile and follows the user. If I have an iPhone, IPad or Jabber or other such device, since those all require a user to log in, the ownership would be added in the same way. This would mitigate the licensing issues caused by extension mobility (in my opinion). 

Using this would really simplify the licensing requirements in my thinking. 

Any thoughts? 

Thanks 

Scott 

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</blockquote>

</blockquote>

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