CoprHD License Question

[jimmyd]

Good day,

I upgraded our dev environment to 3.0 today and noticed the "CoprHD License" verbiage was a bit different.  It now states CoprHD Controller : Limited Use rather than simply CoprHD Controller.  Looking closer I noticed a trial license is applied to Open Source CoprHD which shows a capacity limit of just 300GB.  Is this license just a placeholder?  Or is the 300GB limit actually enforced?  (I would look myself, but I don't have 300GB of storage available on my simulated hardware).

Taking this further, outside of the obvious lack of commercial support.  Is there anything that might prevent someone from using CoprHD in a production environment?  I know it's covered under the apache 2 license, but has anyone heard of any limitations from EMC which might hinder ones capability from using CoprHD for production use?

I know these are loaded questions.  I fully intend on hitting up some EMC folks directly on this, but wanted to see if the community had any feedback.

Thanks!

Jim D

[Urayoan Irizarry]

I haven't heard anything changed. I'm out of the office today, but I'll ask around when I'm in the office on Monday. Maybe someone else that knows will answer before then.

In terms of differences, I think the biggest difference that might affect whether or not you want to go to production with it are the security libraries. ViPR uses some RSA licensed libraries while CoprHD will use just the basic Java libraries.  There may also be some other libraries that may be licensed by ViPR that can't be released openly on CoprHD since EMC doesn't own them. Sorry I don't know better, but I've been out for a while now. :)

Ura

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Carpe Diem

[Ben Perkins]

Answers inline:

On Thursday, May 19, 2016 at 6:43:42 PM UTC-5, jimmyd wrote:

...shows a capacity limit of just 300GB.  Is this license just a placeholder?  Or is the 300GB limit actually enforced?  (I would look myself, but I don't have 300GB of storage available on my simulated hardware).

After asking around, yes it's a placeholder, and no it's not enforced.  The OSS version of LicenseManager.isCapacityExceeded always returns false.

Taking this further, outside of the obvious lack of commercial support.  Is there anything that might prevent someone from using CoprHD in a production environment?  I know it's covered under the apache 2 license, but has anyone heard of any limitations from EMC which might hinder ones capability from using CoprHD for production use?

CoprHD has a few limitations like the one Ura mentioned regarding the security libraries, caused by licensing restricted on distribution of some "3rd party" components. Probably the most significant gap of this kind is the VMware VASA provider not running on CoprHD.

Anyway, presuming you are willing to accept those limitations, and the lack of commercial support, there shouldn't be any legal barriers to running the code in production.  And as mentioned above, there's no license enforcement.

[jimmyd]

Thank you both very much for the responses!  I assumed the license was simply a placeholder...

My other question originated from the perspective of a customer who has an ELA with EMC.  The question might be better stated as:  Does an ELA with EMC specifically prevent a customer from using an open source version of a product if the commercial version is available through said ELA?  I can see the conflict here and wouldn't blame EMC for putting some restrictions in place, but it's something the CoprHD community should be aware of.  Honestly, I don't even know if ViPR is an available SKU on an ELA, so I'll follow-up with EMC directly rather than consume anymore of your time.  I'll make sure to reply to the thread with any feedback I get.

I really appreciate you both taking the time to look into this!  

Thanks again!

Jim D

[Ben Perkins]

I've created https://coprhd.atlassian.net/browse/COP-22571 to get the API/UI to more accurately reflect that CoprHD has no license limitations.

[Matthew Valentine]

Is this limitation in the trail version of ViPR as I noticed it states the same? I just replaced my ViPR lab instance with CoprHD and want to make sure I understand the limitations before moving into production. Besides the securities and HA differences (or can you add another node to create a cluster?) are there others? I've spent all day converting one instance to the other and no blatant differences so far.

[Ben Perkins]

Hi Matthew, I'm not sure I understand your question.  As stated earlier in the thread, CoprHD does not enforce any capacity limits and newer builds should no longer show it as a trial license.

If you're asking about ViPR Trial builds, then yes, I think it does enforce the limits it advertises.

[Matthew Valentine]

Ben,

Thank you for the reply. I believe I was just trying to state that the same verbiage is in the trail version of Vipr so was wondering if the capacity restriction is enforced there. My other question was concerning any obvious differences between Copr and Vipr. I know the difference securities has been stated previously and I don't see an option to add additional nodes to a CoprHD instance but are there others?

Thanks,

Matt

[Ben Perkins]

So on the first question yes, I believe ViPR does enforce that restriction.

On the second, the source tree for CoprHD and ViPR is the same.  The differences are in the build.  Some of the libraries ViPR uses are not freely distributable (RSA Crypto libraries, VMware VASA libraries, etc.) and so the CoprHD build either uses alternative implementations (e.g. JVM Crypto vs. RSA Crypto), or disables the build of certain services (the VASA provider). Nothing prevents creating a multi-node CoprHD installation, but the process is not automated.  You'll find other threads here where people have worked out the needed configurations.  The majority of ViPR features work in CoprHD.

But with ViPR you get a tested multi-node VApp configurations with EMC support standing them.  With CoprHD, you have community support.

Thanks,

Ben

[Matthew Valentine]

Ben,

Thank you for the follow up.