Operations Management Suite is aimed at those organisations which need to manage Windows and Linux workloads across a Windows Server datacenter, as well as Azure, Amazon Web Services, OpenStack and VMWare environments. It’s a collection of integrated Azure services for which the following licences have been available:

• OMS Add-on SL for System Center Standard
• OMS Add-on SL for System Center Datacenter
• OMS E2 SL, which included rights to System Center

There are some October 2016 licensing changes which mean that the following licences are now available:

• OMS E1 Add-on SL for System Center
• OMS E2 Add-on SL for System Center
• OMS E1 SL
• OMS E2 SL
• OMS E1 From SA SL
• OMS E2 From SA SL
• OMS: Insights and Analytics SL
• OMS: Automation and Control SL
• OMS: Security and Compliance SL
• OMS: Backup and Disaster Recovery SL

And these are the important things to note on these new licences:

• The E1 and E2 Add-on SLs can be added to either System Center Standard or Datacenter licences. You need to have 8 Standard Core licences or 2 Datacenter Core licences to purchase either Add-on SL
• The E1 SL allows access to fewer services than the E2 SL but still gives rights to System Center
• The From SA SLs are for customers who want to transition from System Center licences to an OMS SL. As usual, the customer needs to have fully paid System Center licences and, similarly to the Add-ons, you need 8 Standard Core licences or 2 Datacenter Core licences to be eligible for the From SA SL
• The individual SLs enable you to license just the parts of the Operations Management Suite that are of particular interest and several of the SLs also give rights to relevant System Center components

You’ll find all of this documented officially in the October 2016 Product Terms on pages 52-53 and I think it’s worth noting one thing that remains unchanged: you may purchase an OMS Add-on SL through a different Volume Licensing agreement to the one through which you bought the qualifying System Center licences.

And finally, there’s an updated OMS Licensing Guide which has stretched to 9 pages of useful information and is worth a look through. Note that pricing used to be per virtual machine and it’s now per node. What’s a node? Well, page 6 of the Licensing Guide helps us out by stating that it’s a virtual machine, a physical server, a network device or other instance. As usual, find this Licensing Guide in the Core Infrastructure section here: http://bit.ly/MSLicensingGuides.