VPP, EPP, and ELA have special advantages, but it can be difficult to find a solution that suits your business. It can be difficult to determine which VMWare license agreement template to choose. Although VMWare has tried to facilitate the decision by offering limited choices, implementing such an investment is a risky and long-term investment, so it is prudent to do so. To talk to a SoftwareONE licensing expert about your best VMware licensing strategy, click on the banner below! A comment on my previous article regarding the change in VMware`s CPU metric prompted some considerations – and this post. It was a great point that VMware contracts and ELA took precedence over all other software terms, and it occurred to me that it was worth deconstructing VMware`s agreements to correctly interpret the chain and ranking. Understanding how the Agreement and all of its components fit together is essential to understanding VMware licenses and your rights. “means an order, enterprise license agreement or other order document. which refers to and incorporates this EULA […] The Enterprise License Agreement is the ideal contractual agreement designed specifically for international customers. It offers attractive financial and operational benefits that are not available in product-specific transaction agreements between VPP and EPP. With ELA, customers can purchase licenses of VMware products over a specified period of time with a fixed lifecycle price and a fixed renewal fee.
VMware`s License Agreements menu is relatively simple, as there are only 3 major license agreements: VPP, EPP, and ELA. Below is a brief overview of all three, starting at the bottom with low customer expenses/seats and ending with the complex agreement calibrated by the company. Contact us to speak to a SoftwareONE licensing expert about your best VMware license agreement strategy: “In the event of any conflict or inconsistency between the Product Manual, this EULA, and the Order, the following order of priority will prevail, unless otherwise specified in an Enterprise License Agreement: (a) the Product Manual, (b) this EULA, and (c) the Order.” This does not necessarily apply to titles such as vSphere. If you don`t need additional hosts until next year, it doesn`t make sense to buy more hardware just to run the licenses early. For multi-layered software such as vRealize Operations Manager, NSX, new SRM licenses and others, this is very important. The worst possible outcome is to come to the end of an agreement and have software that has never been used. Once you`ve run a new ELA, you`ll face the challenge of having a number of licenses that you have rights to but aren`t provisioned for yet. To maximize the value of this license during the term of the contract, you should deploy these software titles as soon as possible so that you can use them for as long as possible. “VMware may provide you with minor or major maintenance releases as part of a support and subscription agreement. If you install a version that VMware makes available to you, that version applies to the version of the Product Guide that was released on www.vmware.com/download/eula the date you installed the version. Designed for mid-sized customers, EPP offers both better discounts and greater flexibility, without the complexity of more robust agreements. This is achieved by being a token-based licensing program, which means that customers purchase “tokens” to allocate them to use VMWare products, rather than earning points after purchase as in VPP.
In addition, it provides access to future upgrades and ensures that customers can get the latest and greatest VMware products. However, EPP is limited to regional customers, not global customers. Here you can see a very clear statement about VMware`s focus on the product guide. If you think back to the previous article, you can already see its meaning. Because VMware has changed the definition of CPU metric in the Product Guide, this clause in the EULA gives VMware the right to apply this change to ELA customers. Of course, as the clause states, it is quite possible that you, as a customer of your ELA, have negotiated an exception to this order. But such exceptions are rare, and in more than a decade of working with clients, I`ve never seen one. At this point, it should also be noted that the product guide contains a very similar ranking. Note that VMware`s support offering is automatically included in an ELA for your entire installed base, and you`ll end up installing updates for products sold on the CPU license metric.
Especially considering that vSphere 7 now has the ability to fix itself when configured. The moral of the story, unfortunately, is that if you haven`t had exceptional foresight and negotiated a term in your ELA that eliminates the need for standard priority, you`ll be caught up in changing the definition of the VMware processor metric, even if you`re in the middle of the ELA. There`s literally no way around it unless you don`t have support and don`t just run your VMware discount on legacy versions without patches forever. By following the steps above, you can ensure that you have the data you need to make an informed decision and choose the right purchase vehicle for your business. It can take a long time, but it can pay off. Also keep in mind that your VMware account team and organizations like AHEAD can take this burden off you significantly. The key word here is “offerings.” This is a collective word that VMware uses to refer to everything that is offered to you as a customer through the ELA displayed in Appendix A, the ELA calendar. This may include software, support services, token-based purchase programs (such as EPP), cloud or professional services, or training credits. What you need to be careful about is not falling into the trap of believing that this clause gives the ELA control over the terms of the standard EULA – this is not the case; The ELA will always contain somewhere a sentence stating that “Customer`s use of the software is subject to the End User License Agreement,” which is almost always incorporated into an ELA schedule, and if it is not, you will find a link on the VMware website that will take you there. Hundreds of hours of education and the opportunity to listen to Amazon`s most prominent executives – there`s plenty of aws re: Invent 2020 can love. Most companies will eventually have an ELA if they decide to license VMware products. There are pros and cons that depend a lot on your business, but perhaps the two most important of the former are global deployment rights and the ability to trade on favorable (or unfavorable) terms (or as the case may be).
The most important things to understand about an ELA from a contractual perspective are this: When VMware looked at its customers and their existing ELAs, they found that a number of customers had not fully utilized their PSO credits. In response, they recently announced a new program under which PSO credits can be leveraged by authorized VMware service partners such as AHEAD, in addition to the traditional VMware service organization. There is no markup in this process and, at the customer`s request, PSO credits are transferred directly to a partner once a service description has been approved by the customer. This allows client organizations to have a much wider choice of resources, resolves potential resource constraints, and enables customers to accelerate the adoption of these roadmap elements. Again, it`s clear to see VMware`s intent – the “Order” mentioned in the precedence clause clearly includes the ELA, which, as I said earlier, is just a glorified order form. In our previous articles, we introduced Enterprise Licensing Agreements (ELA) in general and then provided information about Dell EMC Transformational Agreements. We`ll now turn to ELA`s VMware taste and discuss some of the implications of the recently announced changes in consumer options. The following pieces of the EULA puzzle relate to the Product Guide itself and are contained in the following clause 1.11, which defines the “Product Guide” as follows: VPP Policies and Discounts – VMware has established four discount levels ranging from 4% to 12% for eligible orders, based on the end customer`s cumulative VPP score. Discounts can be applied to license purchases and do not apply to service and support. VMware`s ELA framework follows very closely the standard ELA that we looked at in our first article. While each VMware ELA is unique due to each customer`s unique licensing and term requirements, it typically consists of a combination of existing licenses, new licenses, maintenance, renewal terms, and Professional Services Organization (PSO) credits.
“the current version of the VMware Product Guide at the time of your order, copies of which can be found at … The second clause, to be considered in the EULA, is the definition of “order” according to clause 1.10: The Enterprise Purchase Program is a token-based program that offers customers an alternative beyond the VPP. .