With the freshly released Version pc.2021.8 of Prism Central, Nutanix integrates new Features to licence Clusters under Prism Central management.
With cluster-based-licensing you were able to choose the license level of a managed cluster. But with this update some changes apply in how you have to apply licenses in the future.
Licence Options Example
The benefits of this new way to apply licences to your managed environment is, that you can choose a different tiers of licences for each cluster under management. For example you need Ultimate Features for Cluster X, but only Pro Features for Cluster Y. For Dev or Testing Clusters you can even leave the Cluster unlicensed, but every node in a cluster must have the same licence tier.
Nutanix changed the way it handles licence features with cluster-based-licencing in this release, because if you access a feature which is within a higher licence tier, the feature is disabled and PC displays a “Feature Disabled” message. The pulled data from a managed cluster which uses widgets or reports from a higher tier feature is filtered out.
The metering Types available are capacity and nodes, based on cluster, for each node. Flow and Calm is available as Core also.
The Feature comes with the following Limitations (copied from the License Manager Guide out of the Nutanix Portal):
Cluster-based licensing is not available for dark site clusters or deployments where clusters are not connected to the Internet.
To use Prism Central cluster-based licensing, Prism Element AOS clusters registered with Prism Central must be licensed with an AOS Starter, AOS Pro, or AOS Ultimate license.
If you have not implemented cluster-based licensing for your managed clusters, you have access to features provided by your existing Prism Central license tier for all clusters registered to Prism Central as usual.
When using Prism Central cluster-based licensing, a Prism Element cluster is considered unlicensed if no cluster-based license is applied. Only Prism Central Starter features are available to manage a cluster without a cluster-based licensed applied.
If you have not implemented cluster-based licensing for your managed clusters when it is available in your Prism Central version, the next time you update your license from Prism Central (for example, applying a new license or consuming unused existing licenses), the Licensing page at the Nutanix Support portal will now present the cluster-based licensing work flow tasks. That is, you must now use cluster-based licensing for eligible registered clusters.
Flow Pro and Starter Option
If you crawl thru the information’s on the Nutanix portal some Screenshots show some of the upcoming add-on tiles Tiers.