Calculating NetWare 6 licenses
 
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Last month we talked about the new user-based licensing model for NetWare 6. No longer will you need to have a license installed on each server for every user accessing that server. In fact, you can have as many servers as you want - it's only users that are licensed.
While this is good news to many NetWare sites, it could cost some a bundle. For example, if your network is for a business that uses four servers, each supporting 100 users from 9 to 5 Mondays through Fridays, you would have needed 100 licenses for each of the four servers - a total of 400 licenses. With NetWare 6, you only need 100 licenses.
On the other hand, let's say your network is for a university with 30 servers and 5,000 users (students, professors, coaches, business people, etc.), but no more than 20 or so users (on average) are attached to any one server. Under the NetWare 5 license, you'd need 20 licenses per server, for a total of 600 licenses. With NetWare 6, you'd need 5,000 licenses.
OK, I exaggerated the usage - but only to make a point. Not everyone will benefit from the new named-user licensing scheme.
Fortunately, Novell already thought of this. It's intended that no one should have to pay more for NetWare 6 than they would for NetWare 5. There are many, many licensing arrangements possible for educational institutions as well as commercial (and non-commercial) enterprises. Visit www.novell.com/licensing/price.html for an overview of the various licensing schemes and download the available spreadsheets to see what your costs will be.
One last tip: to see how many user licenses you'll need to buy for the named-user licensing scheme, visit NetPro's Web site (www.netpro.com/products/dscount/dscount_c.cfm) and download the free DS Count utility that counts users, objects, groups, servers, and partitions in the entire NDS/eDirectory tree. It also displays the subtotals and totals by either partition or container and creates a report that can be saved or printed. It's a neat tool.
RELATED LINKS
Network World NetWare Newsletter, 09/17/01
Dave Kearns is a writer and consultant in Silicon Valley. His most recent book is "Peter Norton's Complete Guide to Networks" published by SAMS. Dave's company, Virtual Quill, provides content services to network vendors: books, manuals, white papers, lectures and seminars, marketing, technical marketing and support documents. Virtual Quill provides "words to sell by..." Find out more at Virtual Quill or by e-mail at info@vquill.com
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