Snow Software helps organizations manage software licenses in virtual environments

Snow Software, the leading developer of Software Asset Management (SAM) solutions today announced the launch of its External Data Provider 4.1, a plug-in for Snow License Manager that enables organizations to collect and use inventory data from multiple third-party sources. Key to the latest edition of the External Data Provider (EDP) is the ability to automatically import data from hypervisors such as Microsoft VMM/Hyper-V, VMware vSphere and Citrix XenServer. This enables organizations to effectively manage the licensing for software provisioned in virtual environments.

With the cost of many licensing schemes now dependent on the configuration of both the physical host device and the virtual guest machine, having audit data from just the virtual PC or server is not sufficient to calculate the licensing obligation. Snow has addressed this challenge by enabling organizations to import data from both the physical and virtual environments, automatically correlating this information so that managers can view the configuration of host devices alongside the virtualized applications.

Data collected by the EDP for physical hosts includes: hostname, manufacturer, model, BIOS information, processor information, operating system and which virtual machines (VMs) are hosted on that physical host. For each virtual machine (VM) details about the hostname, IP address, power state and operating system is gathered.

The External Data Provider is available as an optional module to Snow License Manager and now supports the three hypervisor technologies outlined above plus third-party inventory solutions including Microsoft SCCM, Altiris, FrontRange Discovery and LANDesk. Note: Existing Snow License Manager customers should upgrade to SLM 6.2.08 and IDP 4.4 to realize the benefits from EDP 4.1