License Server on VMWare

[thomas79]

I'm not very familiar with vmware, maybe someone can answer my questions.

Is it possible to install a license server on vmware and copy the vmware image to different machines? In this case every virtual system has the same id and you can use the same license on every machine. Is this right? If yes, what would be a good course of action to prevent this? Is it possible to find out if the license server runs on a virtual machine?

Any ideas? Thanks!

[wmarek]

So the answer is yes, a FLEX license server installed in a VM can be replicated resulting in more licenses being served than were purchased.

If this is a concern, then a simple workaround is to add a check at Vendor Daemon startup (see ls_user_init1() in Programming Reference) to see if the FLEX license server is running in a VM or not, then exit or continue based on the result. The trick is knowing what to look for and then maintaining that over time as it is different for every Virtualization vendor.

Starting with v11.7 Acresso is offering an add-on module to FNP that does the simple detection and adds new licensing keywords for handling virtual environments. Acresso will support a growing number of VM vendor platforms and maintain any changes over time.