HP licensing plan aims to cut cost of virtualisation

Make it cheaper for firms to use the Unix operating system

Computing giant HP has changed the way it licenses its HP-UX 11i to make it cheaper for firms to use the Unix operating system's built-in virtualisation features. But HP warned that firms must wait until other software vendors update their licence charges before they can get the full benefit of server virtualisation.

HP has announced a new licensing scheme that charges customers per virtual machine or hardware partition rather than charging them for the server hardware's full complement of CPUs. HP UX is charged on a per-CPU basis.

HP enterprise spokesperson Peter Hindle said, "For example, a hardware partition with four cores would incur a charge for four licence units. A virtual partition with two cores would raise a charge for two licence units." Previously the two-core virtual partition would have been billed for four cores - the smallest unit previously available.

HP also announced a new sub-CPU virtualisation capability that means a virtual machine (VM) can now be allocated 1/20th or more of a single CPU. Previously the least amount of CPU resource that could be allocated to a VM by HP-UX was a single CPU. The news means firms could squeeze many more VMs into a system.

However, automatic workload management tools running in HP-UX could also be used to allocate a bigger share of the available CPUs to a VM when it is busy. It is not yet clear exactly how firms would be charged for this shifting use of CPUs, but Hindle promised firms would not be penalised. "The idea is that when you use virtualisation you won't be charged more than you otherwise would have been."

But typical licence charges from HP and other vendors for HP-UX applications used in virtualised environments are not yet clear, leaving businesses in some doubt about how to proceed. "You don't get the full benefits of virtualistion until the licensing issue is resolved," Hindle added.