Forum Discussion

a_la_carte's avatar
a_la_carte
Level 5
10 years ago

NetBackup License Keys in use - Symantec Sales Order Certificate

Hello Guys,

Hope you all being good.

 

I have NetBackup environment where a dedicated Assest Management team takes care of the procurement, renewal and purchasing of licenses w.r.t our NBU. The guys are getting reminders that some of the licenses as per the Symantec Sales Order Certificate are going to expire next month in Sep-2015.

They are really not sure whether those licenses listed in Symantec Sales Order certifcate are currently being used in our NBU environment or not.

They have come to the Operations team to assist them with this information if these licenses/license keys are really in use.

 

They have given us Symantec Sales-Order certificate which lists the customer information, sales order number, and license keys along with quantities purchased. But I am unable to find any of such license keys which are listed in the certificate in the bpminlicense command output.

 

C:\Program Files\VERITAS\NetBackup\bin\admincmd>bpminlicense -list_keys -verbose

 

Licenses-Query.jpg

 

1) I would like to know if I am looking at the right place or Am I doing something wrong here?  

2) Are the license keys listed in bpminlicense command output are the only ones in use in current environment ?

3) Shouldn't the ones listed in Sales-order certifcate match the ones in bpminlicense command output?

4) How is this possible that none-of the licenses keys listed in Sales-order certficate matches the one in bpminlicense output ?

5) Or is there any other command/output/screen I should look out for which shows me whether the ones listed in Sales-order certficate are indeed in use or not ?

 

I have faded-away customer sensitive info in above snapshot for the purpose of anonymity.

 

Please assist on priority.

 

 

 

 

 

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  • sdo's avatar
    sdo
    10 years ago

    I'm going to talk about NetBackup licenses - not the SF HA licenses.

    You say the sales order document states:

    "SYMC NETBACKUP ENTERPRISE CLIENT 7.6 WIN/LNX/SOLX64 1 SERVER TIER 2 STD LIC EXPRESS BAND S"

    "SYMC NETBACKUP CLIENT APPLICATION AND DATABASE PACK 7.6 WIN/LNX/SOLX64 1 SERVER TIER 2 STD LIC EXPRESS BAND S"

    ...what is not listed is either a NetBackup Server or a NetBackup Enterprise Server license - therefore the following can be deduced:

    1) The list of two license names does not reflect your entire setup.

    2) The 'support' arrangemnts of your licenses must be in batches / segments / sets - and expiring at different times.

    .

    What may have hapenned is that:

    1) Your site already had some other 'Enterprise Client' and other 'Client Application and Database Pack' licenses already loaded via 'bpminlicense' - which would have unlocked the features required - and no-one has previously bothered to add the additional license keys - hence they do not appear in the bpminlicense list.

    2) Someone may have previously upgraded the license keys in the vLicense site, and not bothered to remove the old keys from, and not bothered to add the upgraded 'keys' to, NetBackup - so now you may have the situation where a key listed in NetBackup does actually refer to a key listed on sales order document - but you cannot link or tie the two together because someone previously didn't administer this very well from the customer side - i.e. someone on the customer side has not kept accurate records of the serial number number, the license keys and the server names throughout the licenses "life" of version upgrades.   In which case all you can do now is ask Symantec Customer Support (i.e. Licensing - i.e. not the Symantec Technical Support teams) for a report of license key "history" and try to piece together the "life story" of the licenses.

    .

    Also ask Symantec Customer Support for an IBR (Installed Base Report) report.   And you should be able to work it all out.

    I also recommend that you start a spreadshet and start to maintain a list of licenses, their serial numbers, keys, versions, full title, dates, and to which server they notionally apply.

    HTH.

  • RiaanBadenhorst's avatar
    RiaanBadenhorst
    Level 6
    10 years ago

    Hi,

     

    Those are storage foundation HA licenses (stating the obvious i know). They are used for clustering, so maybe your master server is clustered.

     

    You can check if there is SFHA running on your Master by running

     

    vxlicrep (it should be pathed)

     

  • a_la_carte's avatar
    a_la_carte
    Level 5
    10 years ago

    Yes Riaan,

     

    Our Master Server is very much clustered. But my main concern is why I couldn't find those License Keys which are listed in this Saled-order under the Product Name Description anywhere in my bpminlicense command output.

    And this is just one part of Sales-Order, I have another one which has listed "SYMC NETBACKUP ENTERPRISE CLIENT 7.6 WIN/LNX/SOLX64 1 SERVER TIER 2 STD LIC EXPRESS BAND S" ; "SYMC NETBACKUP CLIENT APPLICATION AND DATABASE PACK 7.6 WIN/LNX/SOLX64 1 SERVER TIER 2 STD LIC EXPRESS BAND S" & "SYMC APPLICATIONHA 6.1 S64LNX PER VM STD LIC EXPRESS BAND S" in there with their respective License Keys and Quantity which I also, couldnt find in my bpminlicense command output. 

     

    So I am pretty much confused what Licenses are in-use in environment and what are those which are mentioned in the Sales-Order ?

     

    Any help would be much appreciated.

  • RiaanBadenhorst's avatar
    RiaanBadenhorst
    Level 6
    10 years ago

    bpminlicense is a binary that comes with NetBackup and reports on NetBackup licensing. Storage Foundation HA is a separate product by itself, and therefore has its own binary for reporting on licenses. These two products don't have to be installed together but in your case they are.

     

    HTH
     

  • a_la_carte's avatar
    a_la_carte
    Level 5
    10 years ago

    So how should I proceed my here?

     

    Technical-Support says since "Licenses in-use" shown by bpminlicnese command ouput have been working since the start of the environment NBU 7.6.0.1 for more than a year now, so Licensing-support should be contacted further to know what sales-order licenses keys are all about.

     

    Licensing-support says that update the existing license keys with the ones in Sales-order to have the correct ones in the environment, But why the hell one should be doing that when license keys listed in Sales-Order are going to expire in next few weeks.

     

    Guys, Is there a way we can find out the expiration dates of license-keys shown in bpminlicnese command output ? bpminlicnese command output doesn't list expiration dates anywhere it just shows the time when key was added.

     

    :-( I am totally lost.

  • sdo's avatar
    sdo
    Moderator
    10 years ago

    I'm going to talk about NetBackup licenses - not the SF HA licenses.

    You say the sales order document states:

    "SYMC NETBACKUP ENTERPRISE CLIENT 7.6 WIN/LNX/SOLX64 1 SERVER TIER 2 STD LIC EXPRESS BAND S"

    "SYMC NETBACKUP CLIENT APPLICATION AND DATABASE PACK 7.6 WIN/LNX/SOLX64 1 SERVER TIER 2 STD LIC EXPRESS BAND S"

    ...what is not listed is either a NetBackup Server or a NetBackup Enterprise Server license - therefore the following can be deduced:

    1) The list of two license names does not reflect your entire setup.

    2) The 'support' arrangemnts of your licenses must be in batches / segments / sets - and expiring at different times.

    .

    What may have hapenned is that:

    1) Your site already had some other 'Enterprise Client' and other 'Client Application and Database Pack' licenses already loaded via 'bpminlicense' - which would have unlocked the features required - and no-one has previously bothered to add the additional license keys - hence they do not appear in the bpminlicense list.

    2) Someone may have previously upgraded the license keys in the vLicense site, and not bothered to remove the old keys from, and not bothered to add the upgraded 'keys' to, NetBackup - so now you may have the situation where a key listed in NetBackup does actually refer to a key listed on sales order document - but you cannot link or tie the two together because someone previously didn't administer this very well from the customer side - i.e. someone on the customer side has not kept accurate records of the serial number number, the license keys and the server names throughout the licenses "life" of version upgrades.   In which case all you can do now is ask Symantec Customer Support (i.e. Licensing - i.e. not the Symantec Technical Support teams) for a report of license key "history" and try to piece together the "life story" of the licenses.

    .

    Also ask Symantec Customer Support for an IBR (Installed Base Report) report.   And you should be able to work it all out.

    I also recommend that you start a spreadshet and start to maintain a list of licenses, their serial numbers, keys, versions, full title, dates, and to which server they notionally apply.

    HTH.

  • RiaanBadenhorst's avatar
    RiaanBadenhorst
    Level 6
    10 years ago

    Ok, let me try to explain how this works. You have to separate two things in your mind, license keys, and license / maintenance certificates.

     

    License Keys unlock features and are required to be installed on your master, media, opscenter etc. NetBackup has two license models, traditional and capacity.

     

    Traditional licensing is what you're using so you buy one Enterprise Server, one Standard Client, one Database Application, etc etc. This would protect your one Master Server, and one client running for instance SQL. Great, you've bought licenses and now you can add these keys to your master server when you install. BUT the license keys you add to the Master  dont tell you that you're licensed for one master or one client, its says you've UNLOCKED these feautures. You could (but should'nt) take those license and install them on a duplicate environment with one master and one client running SQL.

     

    Capacity licensing purely looks at the amount of data that reside on the clients and you buy it in 1 TeraByte increments. With this you only get one key that unlocks everything. So this illustrates even more clearly that the license key does not tell you anything about your license requirement.

     

    Now on to the maintenance or the renewal of the license certificates.

    AS you would have seen, the maintenance has an expiry date. So at some stage you would need to renew the licenses, if you're still running the same configuration you did when you bought the licenses then you can just renew based on the certificate. Or if you added more components you would need to buy more licenses as well. All of this should really be handled by your local Symantec SE, or Symantec Partner as they would know how to calculate what you're using based on the licensing guide (traditional or capacity licensing).

     

    In addition to this they'll also be able to co-terminate the licenses which means that next year, the NetBackup and Storage Foundation Licenses would come up for renewal at the same time.

     

    HTH

     

     

     

  • a_la_carte's avatar
    a_la_carte
    Level 5
    10 years ago

    yes sdo.

     

    You are right when you say that the 'support' arrangemnts of our licenses are be in batches / segments / sets - and expiring at different times. We have different Sales-order documents mentioning different sets of licenses having different expiration times, and I could say that those might have been purchased at the different period of times as well.

     

  • tunix2k's avatar
    tunix2k
    Level 5
    10 years ago

    Hi a-la-carte !

     

    As already commented bpminlicense gives you a list of Netbackup 8only) licenses.

    The descripttion may differ from then of your sales order.

    I suggest to you:

     

    make a list of your license-products, the serial number and the license key.

    Verify with the installed keys. Do this for Netbackup and StorageFoundationHA.

    Seems its the job of the hired gyues from Asset managemnt !?

    Note normally only license-keys for testenvironment should have an expiration date. Your license never expires. The end date on sale order is not for license it ist the end of your support contract of this license.

     

    Regards

    tunix2k