CLCOR (350-801) Topic 1.1.a: Licensing (Smart, Flex)

[Music] hey welcome back to the channel everybody this is kevin and in this week's video i'm going to attempt one of the most challenging topics of my career to simplify for you licensing when it comes to cisco unified communications i used to joke with my students years ago that cisco should have another certification called the cclp the cisco certified licensing professional because traditionally cisco licensing has been very complicated and convoluted now admittedly cisco's come a long way since those days but some people would argue that it's still fairly complicated now on the cl core blueprint you're told that you need to know about two different types of licensing seems simple enough you need to know about smart licensing and flex licensing however under smart licensing there are two categories under one category there are four options under the other category there are two options under flex licensing we've got four options that's a grand total of 10 different options we have to pick from when we're trying to decide how do we license this thing well that's my challenge and at the end of this video if you think i've been successful do me a favor and give me a like click that thumbs up button down below and also subscribe so you don't miss any of our weekly content now join me as we discuss cisco licensing for a cisco unified communications network one of the topics cisco says we need to know about for the co core exam is how licensing works for cisco unified communications and they give us two different licensing models that we should know about for the exam and these are both different from the traditional licensing model that i used to use in years past when i would buy software like cisco unified communications manager it would come in a cardboard box there would be a dvd with the software inside and there would also be a card inside of that box that had what was called a pack a product authorization key and i would take that key along with the mac address of the server on which i was going to install the software i would go to cisco's licensing portal i would enter both the pack and the mac address and that would generate my license so that means that the license was tied to the mac address of the server that created some problems for me because in a training environment where i'm rebuilding machines all the time i couldn't just easily reuse my license because when i created another virtual machine it would have a different mac address and suddenly my license didn't work so i had to go change the mac address of my vms to make it match the mac address of the server that originally had the license it was a bit of a challenge and that was just in a lab environment imagine in a large enterprise environment where we're trying to keep track of all the different licensing on all the different servers we have now the two newer licensing models cisco wants us to know about are smart licensing and the even newer flex licensing let's talk about each one beginning with smart licensing and smart licensing breaks down into two different types first we have cisco user connect licensing or cucl and this is going to be per user licensing for an individual application such as cisco unity connection in other words we're not licensing a user to use communications manager and unity connection and i'm in presence and on and on so it's not just per user licensing it's per user licensing per cisco unified communications application the other type of smart licensing is also per user licensing but this is for a bundle of cisco unified communications applications let's take a look at these in more detail beginning with the cucl the cisco user connect licensing there are four different types of licensing that fall under cisco user connect licensing there is essential we have basic there's enhanced and we have enhanced plus and there are lots of subtle differences but let me give you some of what i consider to be the high points when it comes to the differences between these different models first let's consider some of the endpoints supported by these different models if you go with the essential model you can support analog phones if you have fxs ports in your cisco gateways you can support faxes and do facts relay and they specify a couple of models of cisco ip phones and that might be a bit restrictive for some users if we go up to basic that adds on a couple of additional phone models the 7811 and the 7821 but if you want even more flexibility you probably want to consider enhanced or enhanced plus which gives us support for all cisco user devices how many phones or how many devices can we support well in all cases except enhance plus a single user can be associated with a single phone or a single device however with enhanced plus we might have a user that's associated with a couple of phones so we get a little bit of extra flexibility if we go with enhanced plus if we have soft clients running as apps on our tablets or smartphones we're not able to use cisco jabber on essential or basic licensing but we can with enhanced or enhanced plus now all of them are going to give us support for cisco unified communications manager that's the heart and soul of our unified communications environment but if we want licensing for something like cisco unity connection because this is per user licensing per application it's going to be an add-on we'll have to add on licensing for our voice messaging solution for cisco expressway to give us firewall traversal that's not even an option for essential or basic but it is for enhanced and enhanced plus let's take a look at one more cisco webex conferencing this is going to be another application so it's another add-on to all of these different license options now that's cisco user connect licensing or cucl let's contrast that with cisco unified workspace licensing or cuwl a lot of people pronounce that as cool licensing and it breaks down into two types standard and meetings remember this is per user licensing still but it's per user licensing for a bundle of applications and a single user can be associated with multiple phones without taking up additional licensing cisco jabber can be run on our smart devices of course we have licensing for cisco unified communications manager but we also without doing an add-on we also have licensing for cisco unity connection for cisco expressway we get that as well but for cisco webex conferencing that's one of the distinctions between standard and meetings it's an add-on for standard but it comes with the meetings option so those are two different options that fall under smart licensing let's consider the even newer option of flex licensing here as many software companies are doing today we subscribe to the licensing it's not a one-time purchase it's a subscription and we can dynamically adjust that subscription based on our particular needs at the moment so we've got a subscription-based plan but one of the main things that makes flex licensing attractive is that it's going to help us migrate to the cloud because what we're talking about with smart licensing is licensing for on-premise unified communication solutions we've got unified communications manager we've got cisco unity connection we've got item and presence we've got cisco expressway all running at our site but what if i start to use some of cisco's cloud solutions for example instead of having a communications manager on site we could go with cisco hcs which stands for hosted collaboration solution and that runs in the cloud we're not managing a local communications manager server cisco also acquired another cloud collaboration company called broadcloud and we might go with cisco broadcloud we might go with a hybrid solution where some things live on premises and some things live in the cloud how do we handle licensing in that environment well the great news with flex licensing is that we can buy a license and it can transfer from on-premise to cloud-based solutions and there are a few options for the flex plans if we want the most flexibility we might want to go with the cisco enterprise agreement this is going to enable all of the users in our company to place calls and to set up meetings of course there's going to be a cost for that flexibility to potentially save some money we might want to consider the cisco collaboration flex plan active user meetings this is going to allow anybody in the enterprise to host a meeting but if only five people host a meeting we're only paying for those five people we're not paying for everybody in the enterprise to have that feature we sort of pay as we go but we're allowing anybody in the enterprise to start that meeting that's a little bit different than cisco collaboration flex plan named user here we specify which users are going to be able to host a meeting and we pay for them or maybe we want to pay for a license that will support our peak number of meetings we might want to consider the cisco collaboration flex plan concurrent agent here we take a look at how many meetings are going on during the busiest hour of the day in other words the hour that has the most simultaneous meetings and we pay for a number of meeting agents users that can set up the meeting we pay for those users which should handle our busiest hour and i realize there were several different options that we could purchase at 10 in total let's summarize those we first talked about smart licensing and that was going to be great for on premise and we had two types the first type was cisco user connect licensing and there were four options essential basic enhanced and enhanced plus and cisco user connect licensing we said gave us per user licensing for individual applications in a cisco unified communications solution so if we wanted to have in addition to cisco unified communications manager if we wanted to have cisco unity connection that was an add-on that we would pay extra for to license users for that platform the other smart licensing option was cisco unified workspace licensing or cool if you prefer and there were two options there there was standard and meetings and the meetings gave us built-in webex conference support well that was an add-on with standard however if we want to start migrating towards the cloud we might want to consider flex licensing and we had four types based on how we're going to be setting up meetings we could license the entire enterprise where anybody could set up a meeting at any time and we didn't pay a different amount based on the number of concurrent meetings or the number of users that started a meeting we just said anybody is allowed to set up as many meetings as they want but if we want to save some money we might want to consider one of the other options we discussed the active user meetings named user or concurrent agent and that's a look at the smart licensing and flex licensing options for cisco unified communications you

Channel: Kevin Wallace Training, LLC

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Length: 11min 16sec (676 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 07 2020