Flex

It is rumored that licensing is being removed completely, so this section may be completely obsolete within a year. Flex is a form of license management that is heavily used in the Netcool product line. It consists of two components, the "lmgrd" license server and the vendor "netcool" application. Both application run on seperate ports and have to be reachable by any application in order for a license to be successfully checked out. When a license request is issued, the request is first sent to the lmgrd process, which then offloads the request to the netcool process. The location of the flex license server is controled by the environmental variable NETCOOL_LICENSE_FILE (LM_LICENSE_FILE in some binaries that weren't correctly setup to use NETCOOL_LICENSE_FILE). Multiple servers can be listed (27000@localhost, 27000@remotehost), but the application requesting the license will not continue past the first host to respond. Thus, if the localhost server is out of licenses, even if remotehost has licenses avialable, it will never attempt to contact remotehost. Remotehost will only be contacted of localhost does not reply to the query. Flex licenses are tied to either the "hostid" output (Solaris) or the MAC address (Windows, RH) of the hardware that is running the license server. When they are issued, they are issued either for the single machine, or in a "quorum" (three seperate license servers tied together).

Quorum

Quorum licensing is a hot topic. The basic idea of quroum is that you have three license servers that all talk to eachother and share the same license pool. If one license server goes down, the two remaining continue to function, but if only one license server is left, no licenses will be issued. Some users take advantage of quroum for failover - once the primary goes down, a license is now available for a cold standby installation that can then be turned up. Normally, when you have a license server local to the application that needs it, the license server would be unreachable during a network/hardware failure, thus unavailable for a cold standby solution. Others use quorum for pools of desktop licenses spread across offices so you wont have multiple locations to manage. With quroum you're dealing with three license servers, not one. There is more management involved - if you ever have to add, remote or change a license, you must perform these tasks on every server in the quroum. Quroum servers are known to have issues talking to eachother - sometimes if a quorum server drops, it can never reconnect unless the entire quroum is brought down and then restarted.

Non-Quorum

Quorum

There is little difference between quorum and non-quorum servers. The only difference being that you have three "server" lines, instead of one. server xxxxxxx localhost 27000 server yyyyyyy remotehosty 27000 server zzzzzzz remotehostz 27000 vendor netcool 27001