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A Breakdown of triCerat's Licensing Options |
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September 27, 2011
These days licensing your products can be one of the most tedious tasks as a Network Administrator. As one of the people in charge of demonstrating our product, I am questioned all the time in regards to how licensing works. In respect to triCerat products, there are two different licensing schemes: per server (also known as standalone) and concurrent licenses.
Per Server (or Standalone) Licensing
Per server licensing is the most typical scenario for licensing with just about any product on the market. With Per Server licenses, each machine requires you to manually input the serial number into the software. This is only ideal if you do not have many machines, all of which will constantly be running with no alterations.
I would recommend per server licensing if you have some terminal servers on your network that you do not foresee changes occurring to the hardware or software in the near future. This is for the “set it and forget it” mentality. You need only apply the serial number once to the machine. You will not have to do it again unless any modifications are made to the hardware, which would change the machine ID of a server. Some examples are adding RAM, swapping hard drives, upgrading processors, etc.
Concurrent Licensing
Concurrent licensing works differently than per server. With concurrent licensing, our software designates a single server with the role of “license server”. Purchased licenses are stored in the %WINDOWS%\System32 folder with a .lic extension. Each machine is then directed to the server with the concurrent license. When a machine is turned on and the software is put into use, a request is sent to the licensed server to “checkout” a license to utilize locally and register the software. Once everyone is logged off of that machine, the license is “checked in” to the license server, thus freeing up the license to be used by another machine.
There are a couple of scenarios in which concurrent licensing would be ideal. One of the most common is for enterprise environments that have a large amount of machines that need to be licensed. The person in charge of these machines certainly does not want to have to manually configure the licensing for each individual machine.
Virtual desktop environments is another scenario in which concurrent licensing would be beneficial. Virtualizing desktops is a huge deal to everyone in the IT field these days and everywhere you go, someone is talking about virtualization. When one virtualizes a desktop, they have their end user draw a copy of that “golden image” and create their own desktop. Each copy of the golden image will have different hardware serial numbers, and most importantly, a different machine ID with our software. With the constant changing of machine IDs and master blasting of virtual machines at the end of the day, taking the time to go around to each machine to perform licensing tasks can be quite monotonous. Whichever hypervisor you use, a Hyper-V, a VMWare product, XenDesktop, etc., concurrent licensing is probably best for this kind of situation.
If you have any questions in regard to licensing, our Support Team would be more than happy to answer them for you.
--CJ Neuman, Jr. triCerat Support Engineer
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