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

[Tim Smith]

Hi Anthony,

I think you’ve captured the usage and options pretty well.

My problem is, I see the best solution in there as a double dip by Cisco.

If I buy 100 UCL Enhanced , then each user is entitled to the use of a physical device.
To me, the issue is still a Cisco licensing enforcement problem.
CUCM is simply calculating the usage incorrectly.

I agree there are lots of technical solutions (Cisco has the owner tool, lots of people do AXL, em proxies, all that stuff is clever and great)
I still think the enforcement needs to be fixed.

I still push Cisco to issue the additional licenses based on using EM this way.
I will never associate Owner ID in an EM deployment, it makes absolutely 0 sense.

Cheers,

Tim


From: cisco-voip [mailto:cisco-voip-bounces at puck.nether.net] On Behalf Of Anthony Holloway
Sent: Friday, 18 September 2015 5:34 AM
To: Scott Voll <svoll.voip at gmail.com>
Cc: cisco-voip at puck.nether.net
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<mailto: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<mailto:avholloway+cisco-voip at gmail.com>> wrote:
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<mailto:svoll.voip at gmail.com>> wrote:
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

_______________________________________________
cisco-voip mailing list
cisco-voip at puck.nether.net<mailto:cisco-voip at puck.nether.net>
https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/cisco-voip


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://puck.nether.net/pipermail/cisco-voip/attachments/20150928/6ff95ef6/attachment.html>