User Licenses easy points

[Jason Berendsen]

We have several HP-UX 11.x development and test servers with unlimited user licenses on each. These machines have very few users on them at a time and it seems a waste to pay for the unlimited user license. What I want to do is reduce the unlimited user license down to a 64 user license. This would amount to a cost savings of roughly $500 per server per year.

My first question is can this reduction be done easily? Is it basically removing the fileset and reinstalling the new one??

Next how does HP-UX denote amount of users on a machine? If I do a who on servers that have many users logging into Oracle I don't see them in the listing. Does each one of these users take a license? Also, if I were to open several terminal windows on a server under my ID would each one take a license?

Thanks for the help.

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

You can probably reduce way below 64. Believe it ot not, ALL network connected users count as 1 whether you have 1,2, or 5000; they still total to just 1 user. Serially connected terminal users count as 1 each. Let's suppose that you have the serial console, 1 user connected on a serial port, and 450 users using telnet. Your user count is just 3.

The HP-UX user downgrades can be done via swremove.

NOTE: These user count only apply to HP-UX; other user counts (e.g. Oracle, Informix, ...) are not calculated this way.

[Steven E. Protter]

My understanding was that some months or years ago HP converted all OS user licenses to unlimited. The administration costs exceeded the revenue.

Heard that at an Education center class.

The whole process was pretty much paper because if you had an old 2 user license or something, that didn't stop you from running 1000 users anyway.

SEP

[Jason Berendsen]

Steven,

Unfortunately, now you can purchase 32, 64 or unlimited licenses.