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What is consolidation of license requirements

Overview

Consolidation is automatic or manual exclusion of license requirements from the license assignment process. Reasons behind such exclusion vary from shared licensing of different software products in a suite to permitted use of a second copy to permitted operation of a server as a backup instance.

Priority of automatic consolidation cases

Automatic consolidation is performed for license requirements in the following order of priority:

  1. Consolidation reason: To Disregard (Suite)

License requirements for software products that are included in software suites where a suite has a license model with the Named User assignment and the suite member software has any other type of license model. 

Such license requirements are consolidated if the system contains a license requirement for the software suite and the consumer of this requirement is a principal user of devices for which the license requirements to be consolidated are created.

  1. Consolidation reason: License Assignment

License requirements that have a mismatch between a technical consumer of software and a license model assignment are consolidated to create license requirements with a consumer matching the license model.

  1. Consolidation reason: To Disregard (Suite)

License requirements for software products that are included in software suites where a suite has the same license model as its member software products. Such license requirements are consolidated if the system also contains a license requirement for the software suite.

  1. Consolidation reason: Consolidated (Not Relevant)

License requirements for software products that use a license model with the empty Automatically created license requirements are effective checkbox.

  1. Consolidation reason: Consolidated (Second Copy)

License requirements for software products that have license models with the Device with Second Copy type of license assignment.

If a user is a principal owner of two devices, at least one of which is a laptop, the license requirement for the laptop is automatically consolidated as a second copy and therefore does not require additional usage rights.

  1. Consolidation reason: Consolidated (Hosting Only)

License requirements that are created for computers that host software products to which members of AD groups have access.

  1. Consolidation reason: Consolidated (Side-by-Side)

License requirements for downgrade software products. License requirements for older versions of a software product are consolidated if the system contains license requirements for a newer version of the same product. This is done if the downgrade consolidation is configured on the Downgrades page of a software product dialog.

Consolidating license requirements manually

Consolidating license requirements means marking a license requirement to show that it is compensated by another license requirement and therefore needs no additional entitlement. This is useful if, for example, an installation of a software product is used only as a backup instance. If the licensing terms permit this, you may then consolidate the license requirement of the backup instance considering the productive copy. In this case it is not effective in your license compliance report.

If the underlying license requirement disappears (e.g., a productive instance is removed), the previously consolidated license requirement becomes effective again.

 To consolidate a license requirement manually:

  1. In the Licenses application go to Required Licenses > All.
  2. Select a license requirement and run the Consolidate action for it.
  3. Choose the Do not take into account and consolidate based on following license requirement record option and then select the license requirement that will account for the consolidated one in the license assignment process.
  4. Enter a comment if necessary and click Consolidate to finish the wizard. The status of the disregarded license requirement will be set to Consolidated and the reason to Ignored.

Removing and preventing consolidations

You can also use the Consolidate action to cancel and prevent consolidations, even the automatic ones.

After you launch the wizard, select one of the following options to stop the license requirement from being consolidated:

  • Take this license requirement record always into account and never consolidate. This option is useful if you are sure that the license requirement needs to stay effective regardless of any reasons for consolidation which the system might find.
  • Take this record into account for the time being and remove current consolidation only. You can resort to this option if current consolidation of the license requirement is incorrect, but the system can consolidate the record later.

 

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