Distributed and redundant license combination

[glisik]

Hi

I have 3 sites with a license server each. The license servers are flexnet running on Windows 2008R2. Here is my problem: we have 2 products running: Autodesk Education Master Suite (EMS) and Autodesk Education Creation Suite (ECS) The Education Master suite has a dsitributed license where 300 seats is split among the 3 locations. We run Education Suite at one site only (20 seats) I wanted to have the Education Suite license be redundant in case the license server at that site goes dowm. However it seems like combining a distributed license file for EMS with a redundant one for ECS gives the error "Invalid license key (inconsistent authentication code)" if I combine the distributed license and single server license for Creation suite at that one site only, it works fine. Anybody else run through this?

Thanks

[TravisNave · Accepted solution]

Welcome to the community!

What you describe is to be expected.  A distributed server is just a bunch of single license servers.  A redundant server, (trying not to get on my soap box about this bad idea) requires 3 servers to run together.  You cannot combine these licenses because its behavior is different. 

You do not have to worry about redundancy because you can get a new license file created and up and running within a few minutes.  If you did run it in redundancy and had a failure, you'd still have to take down all 3 servers and replace the licensing before you could bring them all back up in working order.  So, in all reality, the redundant server only provides you with redundant work and not license protection. 

If you are concerned about redundacy for failure, you might actually instead consider a virtual machine.  That way you can easily move your virtualized server if you had to without worry of invalidating your licensing.  But that's just my opinion. 

Good Luck!

[glisik]

Hi Travis

Thanks for the reply. I guess I was overly concerned about the redundancy. Those license servers are Windows machines running on top of VMware ESX, so I got that part covered already 🙂

BTW just wanted to say that I used your tutorials to get the Flexnet/Flexera running in our network. Thanks again.

[TravisNave]

Excellent. You're in good shape then.

Hardcode those vm MAC addresses and you should be set.