Licensing Question

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#1 Fri, 09/11/2009 - 12:40
pablofm

Licensing Question

Hi there,

I have a 10 Instance License. I am afraid I may have mistaken what an "instance" is.

My initial understanding is that this is per server (i.e physical box). And that we can manage as many xen servers as we like on up to 10 servers. Is that not the case?

I notice that my list of managed servers includes the physical servers and the virtual servers. Are these all being added together to be the total number of instances?

Thank you.

Fri, 09/11/2009 - 12:48
andreychek

Sorry for the confusion!

In the description of the license, the term "Instance" is used to describe a "Virtual Machine Instance".

So for the Cloudmin license -- it doesn't matter how many servers are there -- what matters is how many Virtual Machines, or Guest Operating Systems, or "Instances" are being managed by Cloudmin.

If you have any other questions, just let us know!

-Eric

Fri, 09/11/2009 - 13:07
pablofm

Thanks Eric,

So, referring to an earlier post I made, if I setup Account Plans that allow Owners to create 1 or more instances, each instances they create is counted toward the license total.

What happens if we reach the maximum? Does the system not allow you to add more?

I am looking at this as a service provider. I am going to offer accounts for a monthly fee... I am doing some cost accounting to determine how viable using Cloudmin will be for our business.

I see that there is a 100 instance license available. What happens if we grow more than that?

Thanks!

Fri, 09/11/2009 - 15:30 (Reply to #3)
Joe
Joe's picture

Once you reach 100 instances, you're probably serious enough about Cloudmin to be a reseller of our products...which gets you discounted licensing, month-to-month billing, and a few other niceties (with more coming).

So, when you want to have more than 100 instances managed by a single Cloudmin system, get in touch with me (joe@virtualmin.com) and we'll get you setup in the partner program. If you're also using Virtualmin Professional on some or all of these instances (even if only 10 or 50), you should definitely get in touch with me, because you almost certainly already qualify for the partner program.

100 is sort of an arbitrary maximum instance number...we could go higher in the shop, but we kinda want to be talking directly with customers that are using the product that heavily, so we can make sure things are working well, and we're providing the right features at the right prices to make Cloudmin a profitable part of your business.

We're in the midst of cleaning up the Cloudmin docs right now, and I'll go over the product descriptions right now to make sure things are clear.

--

Check out the forum guidelines!

Fri, 09/11/2009 - 13:36
andreychek

Howdy,

each instances they create is counted toward the license total.

Yup!

What happens if we reach the maximum? Does the system not allow you to add more?

Correct -- once the limit is reached, it would no longer allow you to create additional instances.

I asked Jamie if there were a quick way to determine how many licenses were in use at any given moment, and he offered the following command:

cloudmin list-systems | grep -v Physical | grep -v "Cloudmin master" | tail -n +3 | wc -l

You could use that from within a Cron job, and have it notify you once a certain threshold is surpassed.

I see that there is a 100 instance license available. What happens if we grow more than that?

That's an excellent question! And appears to be an over-site :-)

I'll shoot Joe an email regarding larger Cloudmin licenses; however, it looks as if there will simply need to be additional license options offered on there.

I'll ask Joe to follow up here regarding the licensing.

Thanks!

-Eric

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