Maya 2013 licenses on a 11.12 license server

[jperkins71]

We have some older Entertainment Creation Suite product licenses for 2011, 2012 and 2013 licenses in addition to a set of 2015 licenses running on a new license server (FLEXlm and vendor daemons both at version 11.12).

Some users elsewhere on campus are reporting Maya 2013 can not get a license from the license servers with 2015 licensing.

Questions:

1. is a 2015 license valid to run earlier products, or do older product licenses need to be installed at the same time?

2. is it possible to load multiple versions of licenses on a license server if the latest license is not valid for earlier releases of the software?

3. are there any special registry keys or license config file settings necessary to enable older versions of Maya or other Autodesk products to work with the newer license daemons?

[TravisNave]

1. is a 2015 license valid to run earlier products, or do older product licenses need to be installed at the same time?

If your 2015 license is under Subscription and has the PACKAGE portion in the LIC file, then it should be able to run 2015, 2014, 2013, and 2012.  The 2011 seats will not be able to be used anymore. 

2. is it possible to load multiple versions of licenses on a license server if the latest license is not valid for earlier releases of the software?

Depends.  If the licenses are from multiple products, then you can properly combine them if they were created all on the same date.  Otherwise, the newer license will supersede any overlap of older license.  You cannot run your 2011 license with your 2015 license if your 2011 license comes from a 2013 suite, for example.  That's because the 2013 portion of the 2015 license will supercede the older version.  However, if none of these seats are Subscription files and they only run their one single version, then you can probably combine and run them altogether, assuming you are not using more licenses than you own.

3. are there any special registry keys or license config file settings necessary to enable older versions of Maya or other Autodesk products to work with the newer license daemons?

This is automatic.  The product will always look for the license manager on port 27000@servername of the NLM.  You can modify where it looks by editing the LICPATH.LIC file in the root of the Autodesk application, or with the ADSKFLEX_LICENSE_FILE system environment variable.

What else do you need to know?

[jperkins71 · Accepted solution]

Turns out it was a matter of not importing the old licenses correctly...I had imported a 2012 subscription license (which provided 2010/2011/2012 licenses, but not 2013 licenses).  The 2015 licenses do not have PACKAGE portions of the license file--only INCREMENT entries--which makes me think they are not "under subscription" as you mentioned.

David Lau from Autodesk customer support provided me the URL for the Autodesk License Parser at http://www.licenseparser.com/ which was a great help in debugging this issue.

Once the proper licenses were imported into the 2015 license server, things started working fine for us.

As for registry keys, I had run across some web posts that suggested the "Type" key under HKLM\SOFTWARE\Autodesk\Adlm\Autodesk\<product>\<year>\AdLM or HKLM\SOFTWARE\Autodesk\Autodesk\<product>\<version>\AdLM that needed be changed from "3" to "1" to use network licensing for a product that was originally installed with standalone licensing. I'm not certain whether this registry tweak is necessary or not...but there definitely was a change required to each product's License.env (changing from "standalone" to "network" and serial number to "unlimited") to make FLEXlm licensing work properly.

All seems to be functioning well now, though.