How to Assign Licenses to Users

This lesson details License Assignment for a User license. It allows the user to associate licenses in their environment with specified users.

There are two ways to assign licenses:

  1. Assign all existing licenses for a given product, automatically in bulk, to existing users where products were not already assigned. Or,
  2. Assign specific Licenses to products in a more controlled fashion using the Assignment Wizard.

The Assignment Wizard can be launched from either the License Manager > License Assignment > Assignment Wizard menu, or when reviewing licensable software in the User License Assignment Menu clicking the ‘Assign Licenses’ button and selecting ‘Open Assignment UI’. Either option opens Scene 1 of the Assignment Wizard, but navigating via the ‘Assign Licenses’ action pre-populates the selected software license on this scene.

Assigning licenses in bulk to all available users

In the User License Assignment Summary, the user can review a list of discovered products in the environment, and then assign an owned-license to products from this view:

Device License Assignment Summary

To assign a license for a given product:

  1. Click Assign Licenses button.
  2. In the Information dialog, click the Assign button.

    This will automatically attempt to assign any available license SKUs to any user that does not already have an assigned license.
  3. Alternatively, the user may also choose to invoke the Assignement Wizard by clicking the Open Assignment UI button. This is the same as going directly to the Assignment Wizard from License Manager > License Assignment > Assignment Wizard, but navigating to the Assignment Wizard via the Assign Licenses button in the User License Assignment Summary will pre-populate product information in the first step of the assignment wizard.

The following steps will take the user through the Assignment Wizard.

The Assignment Wizard is a step-by-step process for selecting a software product version for license assignment, displaying eligible users, summarizing the resulting assignment license SKU counts and OSE coverage, and finalizing the assignment and Exposure/Assignment Gap recalculation. The Assignment Wizard can be found at Assign > Assign Licenses > Assignment Wizard.

Select Software Product

Select Software Product

Enter the software product information version information that will be used for the assignment.

  1. Choose the Publisher from the drop-down menu.
  2. Choose the Software from the drop-down menu. Only the software products for the previously chosen software publisher will be shown.
  3. Select the Coverage box if maintenance coverage exists on the Licenses Owned (Current License Position license count). Coverage will affect the list of versions for a software product that a license will cover.
  4. Choose the Version from the drop-down menu.
  5. Choose the Metric for the version.
  6. Select the Skip Detection box when  you want to skip the detection of the software for user-based license metrics. If this box is checked then all devices or users will show up during the Assign Licenses step. Skip Detection is necessary when a detection method is currently unsupported (such as device or user consumption) or when software inventory has not been fully completed and a software liability has not been detected. If you select a currently unsupported detection method and do not select Skip Detection then a pop-up message will alert that to proceed Skip Detection will be applied.
  7. Check Show Assigned to show users that already have assignments.
  8. Click Next to continue through the wizard.

Note: The Licenses Owned is not what is assigned. Licenses Owned vs. Licenses Assigned are reconciled after the wizard to report on the Licensing Gap.

Skip Detection Pop-up Message

Skip Detection Pop-up Message

As mentioned above, if you select a currently unsupported detection method and do not select Skip Detection then a pop-up message will alert you that to proceed Skip Detection will be applied.

Assign Licenses

Assign Licenses

For user license allocation this step displays all Person records.

For user license allocation this step displays all physical users and their hosted guest virtual machines where the selected software is detected. If Skip Detection was checked in the previous step, then all users and hosted guest virtual machines will be shown.

  1. Check the user record/s. Multiple records can be selected by checking the box to the left of the record.
  2. Click Show Coverage to view all of the versions that are covered for that software product. If a non-specific (software assurance) license is assigned to a user then that user will usually cover up to the latest version.
Coverage Rules

3.     Click Show License Rules to view the license rules for that software product. The license rules will show the license metric, detection method, units per SKU, and any use rights for that software product version.

License Rules

 

4.     Click Next to continue to the Confirm Assignments tab.

Note: For Hypervisor hosts, select only the host machine if assignment should use Full-Capacity license assignment and Use-Rights or mix of Full-Capacity and Sub-Capacity to cover the hypervisor virtualization environment. Select only the guest machines to force Sub-Capacity only License Assignment.

Confirm Assignments

Confirm Assignments

This step displays how many License SKUs will be assigned based on the selections made during License Assignment, including OSE (Operating System Environemnt) coverage counts for Physical, Virtual, and Use-Rights OSEs. This also includes any Rule Violations, Exceptions, Skipped Users, and Users Reassigned with drill down views detailing the violation/exception. At the bottom of the view is the Total One Time Expense and Total Annual Expense for the software product. If there are no expense records for that software product then the expense will show as 0.

Users Skipped are users that already had that same license assigned.

Users Reassigned are users that had a previous license assigned and have been reassigned the new license.

If everything looks correct, click Finish to commit the assignment. No assignments are made until the user clicks Finish.

Note: Calculated Software Metrics and License Rules/Use Rights determine if a License Assignment is valid. A user must have the same metric calculated as that attempting to be assigned for it to be valid. Do not add a new Software License Rule for a product version to allow the assignment without making sure that the rule is actually valid for the software product version in question.

After clicking Finish the following pop window will appear showing the user how many license SKUs were assigned.

Software Licenses have been assigned!