Microsoft Single and Dual Physical Processor

Available from 9.2.8. Microsoft Single Physical Processor and Dual Physical Processor metrics are used to determine the licensing cost of Microsoft products. They are based on the number of active physical processors that are deployed on the host where the software is installed. When the software is installed on multiple hosts, all active processors from all hosts contribute to metric utilization.

Microsoft Single Physical Processor metric covers one physical processor. Microsoft Dual Physical Processor license covers up to two physical processors. BigFix Inventory reports the number of processors, not licenses. Thus, the number of processors is rounded up to an even number.

By default, calculation of both metrics takes into account data from the last 90 days because Microsoft licensing rules do not allow for license migration more often than once per 90 days. To change the period for which data is calculated, go to Management > Advanced Server Settings and change the value of the historical_period_for_microsoft_metrics parameter according to your needs.

Supported software

  • Reporting of the Microsoft Single Physical Processor metric is supported for Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter.
  • Reporting of the Microsoft Dual Physical Processor metric is supported for Windows Server 2012 Datacenter or Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter.

Requirements

VM managers should be defined for all virtual machines in your environment. If a VM manager is not defined for a particular host, the number of processors on the host is counted as 0. As a result, license utilization might be underestimated. If a component of a product with any of the two metrics is detected on a host for which a VM manager is not defined, a warning sign () is displayed on the All Metrics report. It indicates calculation inaccuracy.
Note: The warning is displayed only on the user interface. It is not displayed in the CSV or PDF version of the All Metrics report.

Limitations

When a computer on which the software was discovered is deleted, report columns related to server capacity show <no data> in the user interface. Information about computers that contributed to the metric peak value is available in the audit snapshot regardless of whether these computers were removed.

Examples

Example 1: Software is deployed on two physical computers
Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Datacenter is installed on 2 physical computers, each with 4 processors. Metric utilization equals 8.
Example 2: Software is deployed on a virtual machine that was migrated between hosts
Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Datacenter is installed on a virtual machine that runs on a host with 2 processors. Within a period of 90 days from the software discovery, the virtual machine is migrated to another host that also has 2 processors. The number of processors from the two hosts is added. Metric utilization equals 4.
Table 1. Utilization of the Dual Physical Processor metric for a virtual machine that was migrated
Host 1 Host 2
Physical processors 2 2
Metric utilization 4