A systems administrator is reviewing the EULA for a new analytics engine that will run on a pair of rack-mount servers, each equipped with two 20-core CPUs that have Hyper-Threading enabled (40 logical processors per socket). The vendor's terms state that one license is required for every physical CPU core that is enabled in firmware, and that simultaneous multithreading does not increase the license count. No additional CALs are necessary, regardless of how many users connect to the service.
Which licensing model is the software vendor using?
In a per-core (also called core-based) licensing model, the customer must purchase a license for every physical processor core that is present or enabled on the host. Logical processors created by Hyper-Threading/SMT are ignored, and the license fee is not tied to sockets, servers, or user counts. Per-socket licenses would be based on the number of CPU packages, per-server licenses would charge a flat fee per machine, and per-concurrent-user models meter active user sessions rather than hardware resources. Therefore, the scenario describes a per-core model.
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