Move ESXi VM and keep MAC address
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Did you forget to account for the MAC address problem when setting up the VM?
I don't know about you, but how often do you learn about the fact that a machine ties it's licensing to a MAC until you try to move said license?
Hard to say, can't think of any modern product that we'd be willing to use that would do that. But in theory, you generally know that ahead of time. I'm not sure I've ever heard of someone being caught unaware that the MAC address was the licensing.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Did you forget to account for the MAC address problem when setting up the VM?
I don't know about you, but how often do you learn about the fact that a machine ties it's licensing to a MAC until you try to move said license?
Hard to say, can't think of any modern product that we'd be willing to use that would do that. But in theory, you generally know that ahead of time. I'm not sure I've ever heard of someone being caught unaware that the MAC address was the licensing.
Well I guess you can count me in that list. I've walked into several shops trying to do a migration not knowing that. Granted it doesn't happen much anymore, but it does on a scanner software I currently employ, luckily a call to their support desk to reset the license and it locks in on the new MAC upon first use.
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Did you forget to account for the MAC address problem when setting up the VM?
I don't know about you, but how often do you learn about the fact that a machine ties it's licensing to a MAC until you try to move said license?
Hard to say, can't think of any modern product that we'd be willing to use that would do that. But in theory, you generally know that ahead of time. I'm not sure I've ever heard of someone being caught unaware that the MAC address was the licensing.
Well I guess you can count me in that list. I've walked into several shops trying to do a migration not knowing that. Granted it doesn't happen much anymore, but it does on a scanner software I currently employ, luckily a call to their support desk to reset the license and it locks in on the new MAC upon first use.
You can count me in on this list as well. Both of the large CAD developers tie their licensing server to a specific MAC address. The good news is that Hyper-V allows you to assign whatever MAC address you want...so that solved that issue.
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@Dashrender said:
Well I guess you can count me in that list. I've walked into several shops trying to do a migration not knowing that.
That's after the fact. We are talking about at deployment time. Migrating something is too late. Did the person installing the application not know?
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
Well I guess you can count me in that list. I've walked into several shops trying to do a migration not knowing that.
That's after the fact. We are talking about at deployment time. Migrating something is too late. Did the person installing the application not know?
Nope they did not, nor did I when I installed the above listed Scanning software. It wasn't until I tried to move the scanner (and software) to another computer and it told me I was out of licenses. Call to the support desk is how I learned it was tied to the MAC.
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
Well I guess you can count me in that list. I've walked into several shops trying to do a migration not knowing that.
That's after the fact. We are talking about at deployment time. Migrating something is too late. Did the person installing the application not know?
Nope they did not, nor did I when I installed the above listed Scanning software. It wasn't until I tried to move the scanner (and software) to another computer and it told me I was out of licenses. Call to the support desk is how I learned it was tied to the MAC.
That's REALLY weird. It was a secret licensing that no one was informed about?
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I've always known that when installing. It's part of the planning. A lot of the server side apps for fire, rescue and engineering that have floating licenses client side use the mac to tie in activation on the server side.
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@scottalanmiller said:
That's REALLY weird. It was a secret licensing that no one was informed about?
How licensing works rarely if ever comes up. The end user/installer gets a install file and an installation Key, you install and away you go. I'll admit, I rarely read EULAs, so if it was listed in there that it was tied to the MAC I wouldn't know about it until after the fact.
Our scanner solution definitely didn't spell out the fact that it was tieing it's use to the MAC. And I've installed AutoCAD server before and don't recall it saying that it tied to the MAC either.
Are you saying that either a) you are expressly told in the software you typically deal with, or b) you expressly inquire so you know how it works?
What lead you to asking in the first place?
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@Dashrender said:
And I've installed AutoCAD server before and don't recall it saying that it tied to the MAC either.
AutoDesk specifically tells you this when you ask about licensing.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
@Dashrender said:
And I've installed AutoCAD server before and don't recall it saying that it tied to the MAC either.
AutoDesk specifically tells you this when you ask about licensing.
when you ask? meaning you are talking to a person? the last time I installed Autodesk was 15 years ago.. so it could be completely different today.
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@Dashrender said:
Are you saying that either a) you are expressly told in the software you typically deal with, or b) you expressly inquire so you know how it works?
I feel like the software selection process has somehow always enabled us to avoid these kinds of products. A trial, for example, would normally tell you or reviews. I can't imagine quality software that would work this way. Hard to believe that there weren't warning signs.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
Are you saying that either a) you are expressly told in the software you typically deal with, or b) you expressly inquire so you know how it works?
I feel like the software selection process has somehow always enabled us to avoid these kinds of products. A trial, for example, would normally tell you or reviews. I can't imagine quality software that would work this way. Hard to believe that there weren't warning signs.
You can't really avoid solidworks & AutoDesk both with engineering
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Everyone gets caught by weird licensing sometime. But nearly always I found that it is from a time when IT decision making was bypassed. Never seen IT get caught by this, only IT get stuck cleaning it up. I've seen IT have things like this, but they knew about it before installing.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
Are you saying that either a) you are expressly told in the software you typically deal with, or b) you expressly inquire so you know how it works?
I feel like the software selection process has somehow always enabled us to avoid these kinds of products. A trial, for example, would normally tell you or reviews. I can't imagine quality software that would work this way. Hard to believe that there weren't warning signs.
You can't really avoid solidworks & AutoDesk both with engineering
True. But I think people tend to be aware of how the licensing works with those. How often do you see those catching people "by surprise" after install time?
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@Dashrender said:
@thecreativeone91 said:
@Dashrender said:
And I've installed AutoCAD server before and don't recall it saying that it tied to the MAC either.
AutoDesk specifically tells you this when you ask about licensing.
when you ask? meaning you are talking to a person? the last time I installed Autodesk was 15 years ago.. so it could be completely different today.
I and most people I work with always as vendors how their licensing works. It's uses part of the pre-sales and post sales meetings as well.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
@Dashrender said:
@thecreativeone91 said:
@Dashrender said:
And I've installed AutoCAD server before and don't recall it saying that it tied to the MAC either.
AutoDesk specifically tells you this when you ask about licensing.
when you ask? meaning you are talking to a person? the last time I installed Autodesk was 15 years ago.. so it could be completely different today.
I and most people I work with always as vendors how their licensing works. It's uses part of the pre-sales and post sales meetings as well.
You have control of what software you purchase? It isn't just thrown on your desk?
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These particular problems are pretty wide and far between, and almost never effect consumers...
But Scott's right, when the decision is made my non IT, that's when most problems occur, and where I have found myself more often than not.
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@Dashrender said:
These particular problems are pretty wide and far between, and almost never effect consumers...
But Scott's right, when the decision is made my non IT, that's when most problems occur, and where I have found myself more often than not.
Right, which bypasses IT "knowing" and explains why IT often gets caught cleaning up licensing issues. If IT does the decision making and approval and research sure, licensing blips will slip by sometimes, but by and large I think the majority of weird issues like this get caught and either avoided (move to a different vendor) or mitigated (come up with a good strategy for dealing with it like virtualizing MACs or just documenting well.)
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One, after the fact use cases I ran into, was when I was playing with ESXi and Veeam replication of vCenter 5.0. Upon successful replication of the vCenter appliance from one host to another, I found that the O/S running vCenter, some flavor of Linux, would assign a new MAC address to a new eth0 NIC. You could go in via command line and fix that, but as a more Windows-type admin, no one has time for that. My fix then was to copy the MAC address on host one. When you switch the MAC type to static, it will want to assign something new (why you copied prior to this). Once done, I now had a good replicated vCenter. My environment really doesn't need one, but was playing.
If I remember, possibly newer versions of ESXi have a reserved block of MACs that may be causing the error above. Anyway, that's my 2 pennies.
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@DenisKelley said:
....some flavor of Linux, would assign a new MAC address to a new eth0 NIC.
The MAC isn't assigned by Linux. You can override it there. But this would be the hardware, the hypervisor or the driver doing that, not Linux.
