Understanding LoadRunner Licensing
LoadRunner licensing seems to confuse some people (there are currently 2563 product numbers under the “Performance Center” centre in the HP pricelist). This Tech Tip attempts to clarify how it all works.
LoadRunner licenses fall into one of the following categories:
- Perpetual license
- Term license
- Virtual User Days
- Software as a Service
When you purchase a LoadRunner license, you will need to purchase a license for a LoadRunner Controller and for a certain number of Virtual Users of a particular type.
In the past, Mercury used to require a license for each of the separate LoadRunner monitors, but now purchasing a Controller license will get you all of the LoadRunner monitors (which makes things much simpler).
You cannot run any tests with your LoadRunner Controller until you have purchased a license for some virtual users.
The information you will need to collect for a licensing quote is:
- Protocol/Vuser type
- License duration
- Number of virtual users (if you will need multiple protocols, you will need to break the number of virtual users down by vuser type)
Virtual User Types
All licenses are based on the type of virtual user, so you will need to understand what protocol your application uses to communicate with the server (the new Protocol Advisor feature in LoadRunner 9.50 will help with this).
LoadRunner comes with 49 different types of virtual user. For licensing purposes, these are divided into 16 protocol “bundles”. The bundles are priced differently, depending on the amount of functionality you receive. For example, the COM/DCOM bundle just contains the COM/DCOM vuser type, but the SAP bundle contains SAP – Web, SAP – (Click and Script), and SAPGUI vuser types. Note that the Web & Multimedia bundle does not contain the Web (Click and Script) virtual user – it is in the Web 2.0 bundle.
The bar graph above does not include the GUI virtual user type, which allows you to run QuickTest Pro scripts as part of your LoadRunner scenario.
License Duration
There are three main LoadRunner license types: perpetual, term (1 month or 3 month), and Virtual User Days. These are all priced differently.
The license types are the following:
- A Perpetual License lasts forever. It is the best value license type if a company plans to do ongoing performance testing (especially regression testing). Note that you will have to pay an annual “Maintenance” fee which entitles you to support, new product versions, and patches. A very small number of customers choose not to pay a maintenance fee, and stay with the same version of LoadRunner for many years, and try to get by without access to the HP’s support knowledgebase and support consultants. The annual maintenance fee is approximately 22% of the cost of the license, so not paying maintenance makes no sense unless your upgrade cycle is longer than 5 years (the break-even point).
- A Term License lasts for either 1 month or 3 months. A 1-month term license is a little over half the price of the 3-month term license, so if you think you will need a license for 2 months, it makes sense to by the 3-month license instead of two 1-month licenses.
- Virtual User Days confuse a lot of people. The LoadRunner Product Manager tried to clarify how it works in Explained: Virtual User Days. Basically, a VUD will allow you to run 1 virtual user for 1 day; so 1000 VUDs would let you run tests with 1000 vusers for a single day, or let you run tests with 100 vusers over 10 days. LoadRunner 9.50 added better logging to keep track of how many VUDs have been used. The smallest number of VUDs that can be purchased is 1000.
- An alternative to purchasing a license is Software as a Service. HP manage several very large Performance Center instances and load generator farms that can be used to run tests against public-facing websites. This can be useful for one-off tests with a massive number of concurrent users. Currently HP has no load generators in Australian data centres, but you should be able to connect to other load generators (e.g. JDS has load generators in data centres in the larger Australian cities).
How many virtual users?
Permanent licenses for virtual users are sold in packs of 25, 50, 100, 250, 500, 1000, 1500, 2500, 5000, and 10000. As you can see from the graph, the price per virtual user becomes smaller if you buy more vusers. If you need more than 10000 virtual users, you should negotiate directly with HP or an HP partner.
Virtual User Days are sold in packs of up to 1 million VUDs.
Other Notes
- HP have been known to negotiate “all you can eat licenses” with larger customers, where they are offered unlimited licenses over a particular time period (e.g. 5 years).
- An “all you can eat” license will not include an unlimited number of certain virtual user types, as these vusers require HP to pay a royalty to another company (e.g. DCOM vusers).
- HP does charge for media (software on DVD + hardcopy manuals). You can save a small amount of money by downloading the software instead, and using the PDF manuals.
- License costs are based on the US dollar, so prices in other countries will change when the exchange rate changes. Currently the Australian dollar is worth almost $US 0.90, so it is not a bad time to buy software licenses from HP.
- HP Diagnostics is licensed separately, but to integrate it with LoadRunner, you will need to request a new LoadRunner license with this enabled. There is no charge for the new LoadRunner license key.
- Buying a LoadRunner license entitles you to a free 500-point SiteScope for LoadRunner license
Note that information is correct for LoadRunner 9.5, but may change in the future. Talk to a sales rep from HP or an HP partner (like JDS) for actual prices.
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October 7th, 2009 at 10:56 am
JDS had a client who was so impressed with the data analysis capabilities of LoadRunner, that they purchased a Controller license even though they still ran their tests using load generation tools that had been generated in-house (for their custom protocol).
They then imported the data from their other tools into LoadRunner Analysis at the end of the tests.
This is a good example of why licensing the Controller and the virtual users separately is not a bad idea.
October 13th, 2009 at 8:43 am
Hi Stu,
It would be nice to have an understanding as to which LR software components (i.e. Load Generator, VuGen, etc) are licensed and which aren’t.
For example, can I legally run VuGen on my local workstation? Or do I have to use it on the controller?
Thanks.
October 13th, 2009 at 8:50 am
Great question!
There are 4 main components to LoadRunner:
The only component that requires a license is the Controller. All other components can be installed as many times as you like.
This means that you can install VuGen on several PCs and have performance testers creating scripts in parallel.
Technical stakeholders working with you to fix performance problems like to be able to see low-level test results, rather than a summary. I will generally install LoadRunner Analysis on their PC and give them a 10-minute tutorial on how to use it.
Virtual users can be run from multiple load generators if you need to emulate a large number of users and need to horizontally scale your load generation capacity. Installing on multiple generators is also good if you need to generate traffic from different locations on the network (e.g. over the WAN).
Cheers,
Stuart.
November 9th, 2009 at 3:04 pm
Some people have been asking which vuser types are in each bundle. Here is the answer for LoadRunner 9.0 (note that there have been some minor changes since then)…
.NET Record/Replay
Database
DCOM
Network
Oracle E-Business
Remote Access
Rich Internet Applications
SAP
SOA
Templates
Web and Multimedia
Wireless
GUI
Java Record/Replay
Remote Desktop
Web 2.0
November 16th, 2009 at 9:42 pm
Hi,
My company wants purchase new loadrunner licence, actually we need to test application for 500 users load. In this case can we purchase 100 vusers licence or we need to purchase 500 vuser licence?? If anyone answers it would be great.
November 17th, 2009 at 2:22 pm
Hi Raju,
You may be able to run the same number of transactions per hour with 100 vusers, as you can with 500 vusers (maybe), but your test will be less accurate.
Assuming that you are testing a web application, your vusers will have fewer sessions active on the server, and less open network connections. If your system has problems in these areas, you may not discover them during testing.
You must decide whether the smaller licensing cost outweighs the risk of problems not being found in these two areas.
Cheers,
Stuart.
November 17th, 2009 at 8:35 pm
In order to make a Loadrunner license purchasing decision, I understand that one needs to provide number of Controllers and number of Vusers.
Now, how do we decide on how many controllers are required?
Can we use 1 controller with any number of Vusers.
We may need vusers of different protocol mix like .Net / Database / SOA / Web and Multimedia.
November 18th, 2009 at 8:29 am
Hi Anoop,
The Controller is used to run your load test, so to determine how many LoadRunner Controllers your company needs, you need to determine how many load tests you will need to run at the same time. Usually, the answer is “one”; a project is only going to have a single Performance Test environment, and a company is not likely to run a large number of projects at the same time (that require load testing).
Really big companies will have several LoadRunner Controllers, or will use Performance Center instead.
Your Controller can be licensed for any number of virtual users of any type, but these virtual users cannot be moved between Controllers (this is a reason you might buy Performance Center instead, if you are a large company).
Cheers,
Stuart.