BYOL Licensing Considerations

IT Asset Management (Cloud)

The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure connector does not return full inventory from instances running in the Oracle cloud, and so does not create inventory device records. There are two special cases to distinguish:

If the import from the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure connector is matched with another record of full software and hardware inventory, the matching process creates an inventory device record. Full software and hardware inventory may be returned from an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure instance when either:

• FlexNet Inventory Agent is locally installed on the instance, usually because it is part of the Oracle cloud VM Image from which the instance was launched
• You configure zero footprint inventory collection from an inventory beacon that has network access to your target instances, and credentials saved in its Password Manager store
• You have some third-party tool, such as Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager (previously Microsoft SCCM), collecting inventory from your Oracle cloud instances, and these results are then being imported into IT Asset Management.

Whatever the method, when inventory is returned from a running Oracle cloud VM instance, it has an inventory device record in IT Asset Management. As always for all inventory devices, the installations found in software inventory for that device consume entitlements from the licenses to which each software record is linked.

However, there are a few special adjustments for inventory from Oracle cloud VM instances.

Beware of terminating instances

For some special purposes, instances in the Oracle cloud may be launched, run for a short period (from a few minutes to a few hours), and then shut down until needed again.

It is quite possible to configure the Oracle cloud VM Image from which instances are launched so that inventory is collected and uploaded through one or more inventory beacons to your IT Asset Management application server (for details, see Configuring an Oracle Cloud VM Image for Instances).

However, the licensing implications are quite different when you stop an instance than when you terminate an instance:

• The assumption is that a stopped instance may be restarted when required, and resume operation with (quite likely) the same software installed. It is therefore reasonable to calculate license consumption for such an instance, and, if you use the configuration described in Configuring an Oracle Cloud VM Image for Instances, this happens as usual for virtual machines (whether those are VMs within your enterprise network or instances in the cloud).
• A terminated instance cannot be restarted, and if you are choosing BYOL for instances that you terminate, you should check your license terms carefully and make appropriate provision. The working assumption in IT Asset Management is that a terminated instance should no longer consume from your software licenses, just as license consumption stops when you uninstall software from a device, or decommission a hardware asset. As described in Collecting Inventory from Instances, this is achieved by permanently deleting any inventory device record that may have previously been created for the instance that is now terminated. All resources attached to the terminated instance will remain and you can then manually delete these resources as desired. (See the same topic for a way of re-discovering the software load for a terminated instance, and hence its potential license implications.)

The complexity of managing licenses on transient instances is why it is more common to purchase these based on a fully-loaded image provided by (and licensed through) Oracle. However, if you need repeated runs of an instance for special purposes, and such an instance must include software for which you provide the license (BYOL), consider running such an instance as a stop/start instance, rather than terminating it and re-launching it, to simplify your license management.