Farm Licensing

I would like to revisit an idea that I pitched last year, which would allow to have a different, more fluid licensing system for Server Farms. What this would ideally enable is for the user to set a total number of concurrent users per farm, which they could then play around with within the load-balancer.

Picture this: There is a client who wants to have a farm with 10 concurrent users. Licensing and financially wise for the client, it is best to offer him 5+5 concurrent users for the application servers (not taking into account the gateway right now). There might however come a time where the client suddenly needs to shift things around and have a 7+3 setup instead of 5+5 for whatever reason. In order to allow this, the client would realistically have to buy a 10+10 user setup, which would allow him to freely loadbalance between these servers. This would however mean that they have to pay for twice as many users as they have. Now I understand that this is a bit easier to do if you have the entire farm as a subscription as you can play around with it from the customer portal, but a large portion of the clients are looking for perpetual licensing because owning>renting in this day and age which is becoming apparent in many other industries as well. At least that is the sentiment that I feel.

Could we come up with a way to offer them a perpetual-like license which would act as a pool of total concurrent connections per farm? Let's say you would apply it to the gateway and the loadbalancer would automatically take this number and spread it across the servers based on the user's preferences? You could also be able to turn this feature on and off, or make it so that it only works with an active update and support license and call the feature "Pool load-balancing". That would create another incentive to make sure your support is always up-to-date.

I would love to hear your feedback on this!

DD