Managing Dell PowerFlex Licensing and Being Way Less Sad
Mon, 24 Jul 2023 21:20:14 -0000
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Imagine there was an easy way to view and manage your Dell PowerFlex licenses. Wouldn’t that be nice? I know I’d be way less sad. Well guess what, I’m way less sad, and there’s a way to easily manage your PowerFlex licenses.
I was on a call today with one of our product managers. He was showing something really cool, and I just had to share it with everyone. You can go into CloudIQ and view all your PowerFlex licenses.
You might think, “big deal, licenses.” You’re right! It is a big deal. Okay, a moderate sized deal, it makes me less sad. And here’s why. Have you ever had to track licenses for your environment in a spreadsheet? How about sharing that spreadsheet with everyone else on your team and hoping that no one accidently removes too many rows or types in the wrong cell. Or maybe you have to correlate a license to how much capacity you’re using. I’m sure 90% of users love this method. What’s that I hear you yelling at your monitor, I’m wrong???
You’re correct, hardly anyone wants to track licenses that way. Why? Because its error prone and difficult to manage, plus it’s not automated. Oh, and it’s licensing. Well, CloudIQ can help you address a lot of this, at least for your PowerFlex environment.
That’s right. You log in, click on the Entitlements and System Licenses option in the menu, and you can see all your entitlements for PowerFlex. With that you can see how many terabytes of capacity each license has as well as the start and end dates. It’s all there, no spreadsheets, no manual entry, it’s easy to manage. Maybe 90% of users would prefer this method over a spreadsheet. You can see this functionality in the screenshot below.
It gets better though…. Maybe you want to dig into the details of your environment and see how different licenses are being used. Maybe you are licensed for a petabyte of storage but you’re missing 50ish terabytes and want to see where they went. If you click on the details of an entitlement, you can see which systems are consuming capacity from the license. This makes it a lot easier than a spreadsheet to track down. You can see this in the following screenshot.
I’m sure it’s hard to get excited over licensing, but hopefully this makes you way less sad knowing you don’t have to try and track all this in a spreadsheet. Instead, you just log in to CloudIQ, then click on Entitlements and System Licenses. Poof, there it all is, in an easy-to-consume format. And for those who still want to manage their licenses in a spreadsheet, there’s an export option at the top of the table just for you. You can create pivot tables to your heart’s content. For everyone else, you’ve just unlocked a PowerFlex secret. Hopefully, like me, this makes you way less sad about licensing.
If you’re interested in finding out more about what you can do with licensing in CloudIQ, reach out to your Dell representative, who can guide you on all CloudIQ has to offer.
Author: Tony Foster
Sr. Principal Technical Marketing Engineer
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