DETAILED ACTION
Status of Claims
This action is in reply to the application filed on 06/15/2026.
Claims 1, 4, and 7 have been amended.
Claims 1-9 are currently pending and have been examined.
Notice of Pre-AIA or AIA Status
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
Response to Arguments
Applicant’s arguments filed 06/15/2026 with respect to the rejections under 35 USC § 102/103 have been considered but are moot in view of the new grounds of rejection.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 103 which forms the basis for all obviousness rejections set forth in this Office action:
A patent for a claimed invention may not be obtained, notwithstanding that the claimed invention is not identically disclosed as set forth in section 102, if the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art are such that the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which the claimed invention pertains. Patentability shall not be negated by the manner in which the invention was made.
Claims 1-9 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Kouznetsov et al. (US 2017/0097845 A1) in view of Salapura et al. (US 2018/0007127 A1).
Claims 1, 4, and 7:
Kouznetsov discloses the limitations as shown in the following rejections:
A distributed ecosystem of information handling systems, comprising: a plurality of host systems; and a manager (VMM) comprising a program of instructions/[Claim 7: a non-transitory computer-readable medium; and computer-executable instructions carried on the computer-readable medium] configured to, when read and executed by a processor of one of the plurality of host systems: determine workload requirements for a workload (VM or VM sub-group) to be executed on one of the plurality of host systems (¶0031-0033; 0036-0037, 0041; FIG. 1; Kouznetsov claim 21).
based on endpoint capabilities (e.g. host capacity), current execution load, and a license status for an execution environment (e.g. guest OS) of the workload on each of the plurality of host systems, select a selected (with highest score) host system from the plurality of host systems to minimize a number of licenses required for the execution environment (¶0027, 0032-0035, 0040-0041, 0060, 0064) disclosing VMs are grouped and assigned to hosts based on constraints and placement optimization policies, including objectives to lower needed licenses and costs thereof. Exemplary quotation:
“licensing costs for some software used by VMs 18 are based on the amount of host resources on which the VMs 19 run…reducing the host resource footprint of the selected VMs 18 can reduce software license requirements. In this example, the Windows® VMs 18 are licensed based on their host footprint. Therefore, running the Windows® VMs 18 on fewer hosts results in lower software licensing costs” (¶0034-0035).
place the workload for execution on the selected host system (¶0028, 0033, 0044, 0066, 0084).
Kouznetsov does not describe the license allocation process and does not specifically disclose responsive to a determination that the selected host system lacks a license for the execution environment, acquire a license for the execution environment from a license pool and install the license on the selected host system.
Salapura, however, discloses (¶0007, 0087) analogous methods of managing server (host) licenses including licensing for VMs (execution environments, “software can be licensed per hypervisor (the whole server is covered) independently of the number of VMs running on it, or it can be licensed for up to a given number (e.g., 4) VMs per server” (¶0007)), and discloses responsive to a determination that the selected host (server) system lacks a license for the execution environment (is “under-licensed”, software requiring license is installed/started), acquire a license for the execution environment from a license pool and install the license on the selected host system (¶0089, 0095-0100, 0103; FIG. 8, 9) .
“A license may be associated with one or more license types each of which has a defined or configurable characteristic for the type…preferably there is a pool of licenses from which a particular license can be obtained, applied to a disaggregated server entity or some component thereof, and then returned to the pool once the particular license is no longer needed. When a license is obtained from the license pool, preferably it is marked in the pool as being unavailable” (¶0089)… application (or, more generally, some resource) that requires licensing is installed and started on this disaggregated server…license allocator allocates an available license (or multiple licenses), as recommended by the license calculator, and allocates it (or them) to this disaggregated server…these allocated license(s) removed from the pool of licenses otherwise available to the license manager” (¶0099).
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art prior to the filing date of the claimed invention to modify Kouznetsov to employ the license manager of Salapura to facilitate optimal licensing in changing environments via dynamic license reallocation and provide more robust inventory management over the server resource pools and the licenses (Salapura ¶0087, 0105-0107).
Claims 2, 5, and 8:
The combination of Kouznetsov/Salapura discloses the limitations as shown in the rejections above. Kouznetsov further discloses wherein the workload requirements comprise one or more of hardware requirements, processing requirements, memory requirements, and required execution environment (OS type, Linux Windows, etc.) for the workload (¶0032, 0037, 0040-0041).
Claims 3, 6, and 9:
The combination of Kouznetsov/Salapura discloses the limitations as shown in the rejections above. Kouznetsov further discloses the endpoint capabilities comprise one or more of hardware capabilities, processing capabilities, memory capabilities, and required execution environment for the workload (¶0032, 0038, 0040-0041).
Conclusion
The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant’s disclosure:
The following are directed to optimizing licensing costs in a cloud or DC environment: US 20190370437 A1; US 9846899 B1, US 20170255890 A1, US 20170220779 A1, US 20160180063 A1, US 20130326637 A1, US 20100205303 A1.
Applicant's amendment necessitated the new ground(s) of rejection presented in this Office action. Accordingly, THIS ACTION IS MADE FINAL. See MPEP § 706.07(a). Applicant is reminded of the extension of time policy as set forth in 37 CFR 1.136(a).
A shortened statutory period for reply to this final action is set to expire THREE MONTHS from the mailing date of this action. In the event a first reply is filed within TWO MONTHS of the mailing date of this final action and the advisory action is not mailed until after the end of the THREE-MONTH shortened statutory period, then the shortened statutory period will expire on the date the advisory action is mailed, and any nonprovisional extension fee (37 CFR 1.17(a)) pursuant to 37 CFR 1.136(a) will be calculated from the mailing date of the advisory action. In no event, however, will the statutory period for reply expire later than SIX MONTHS from the mailing date of this final action.
Any inquiry of a general nature or relating to the status of this application or concerning this communication or earlier communications from the Examiner should be directed to Paul Mills whose telephone number is 571-270-5482. The Examiner can normally be reached on Monday-Friday 11:00am-8:00pm. If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the Examiner’s supervisor, April Blair can be reached at 571-270-1014.
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/P. M./
Paul Mills
08/25/2026
/APRIL Y BLAIR/Supervisory Patent Examiner, Art Unit 2196
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