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Auto assign Oracle licenses

Oracle licenses can be auto assigned to an environment. To enable auto assignment: on the SAM Core menu, under Applications, select Oracle, and then select the Entitlements tab. On the Auto assignments view, select the Auto assign is inactive toggle switch.

Note

If auto assign is enabled, compliance for your Oracle environment is likely to be affected. Read this entire section before enabling the feature.

How auto assignment works

When run, auto assignment analyses the need for licenses to cover incompliant environments. Environments are virtual machines, physical servers, and datacenters. When an incompliant environment is discovered, auto assignment finds out whether there is need to license all of its products. If there is an adequate amount of licenses—entered via Oracle orders—to cover all products for an environment, auto assign will cover that environment; otherwise, that environment will be skipped by auto assignment and will be retried the next time auto assignment runs.

For example, if there is need for auto assign to cover four required licenses for a product that is installed on an environment, but only three licenses exist, the environment will not have licenses auto assigned to it. The next time auto assignment runs, the process will be retried.

Auto assignment rules

The default rule assigns licenses where the License Type is Full Use and the metric is Processor.

To create user-defined rules, select Configure auto assignment rules. This starts a wizard that contains four steps:

  1. Configure rules

    This step is where rules can be created, changed, activated, and inactivated. Select the Status toggle switch to make a rule active or inactive.

    Where the Value box can contain text, use a vertical bar ( | ) to enter more than one value. Do not add space characters before or after use of the vertical bar.

    Example 13.

    If the rule Database name is activated and its Value is DBName|Maintenance, auto assignment will only affect environments where the database name contains DBname or Maintenance.



    Select Continue to go to the next step.

  2. Confirm environments

    This step previews the results for every rule before they are applied. The number of covered environments and the percentage of the total number of environments are displayed, per rule. When the number of covered environments is more than zero, you can select the linked text to see a preview list of the environments that will be affected by the rule.

    Select Continue to go to the next step.

  3. Confirm licenses

    This step displays:

    • The total number of orders that will be used to assign licenses.

    • The total number of licenses that will be assigned when the rules are applied.

      The number of licenses is also displayed by NUP and Processor, respectively.

    • The total number of environments that will be covered.

    • The compliance status before and after license assignment.

    Select Complete configuration to complete the configuration and go to the next step.

  4. Finish

    This step confirms that the auto assignment rules have been successfully configured.

The auto assignment process

When enabled, auto assignment is scheduled to occur once every day at 06:00 a.m. When user-defined rules are active, auto assignment can also be triggered manually, by selecting Trigger the auto assignment process now.

The auto assignment process consists of the following steps:

  1. Auto assignment analyses the environments to see where licenses are needed.

  2. If any user-defined rules are active, auto assignment will fill those license requirements first. This means that licenses where the License Type is Full Use and the metric is NUP will be covered first.

    When those licenses are covered, auto assignment continues:

  3. Auto assignment covers the licenses where the License Type is Full Use and the metric is Processor.

    If user-defined rules do not completely cover license requirements due to an insufficient number of licenses for the selected metric, the default rule will be applied instead.

Note

  • When auto assign is enabled, the default rule will execute even if no user-defined rules are active.

  • Hard partitioning environments (IBM LPAR) with licenses manually assigned to one or more levels will not be included in the auto assignment process.