License Server Migration Planning

[bradstinson]

Hello,

I'm a sysadmin responsible for maintaining my company's license server and licenses it serves. I've been planning a migration from our current on-premises license server(s) running on Windows Server to running on CentOS7 on an AWS EC2 instance. I've read tons of documentation, but I have some lingering questions that none of it was able to address, nor searches across the community forum:

1) When we renew our license with all of our features in it, can we get the BORROW keyword in it? Is the keyword even compatible with our particular features in the license file?
2) Does the "rehost" process actively nullify the current in-use license on our currently running license server? In other words, does the act of renewing/ generating a new license cause an "outage" for developers using the existing license server?
3) What is the difference between the Intel Software License Manager that I'm unable to download from the Intel Registration Center and the vendor daemon tarballs I'm able to download from the Download Center for FPGAs? Is the Software License Manager just a lmgrd binary?

Ultimately, I'm trying to assess how to execute this migration and minimize license server downtime for my engineers. I suspect that temporary licenses may be able to help provide a grace period for a transition window, and I've read the handful of PDFs on how and where to click around in the Self Service Center, but I really could use some advising about how all of these pieces can fit together properly. I'd feel a lot more comfortable clicking "generate new license" if I had assurance that it wasn't going to stop my existing license from being served to engineers and I wasn't forced into a hot-swap in-place scenario. Moreover, if there is a way to generate that new license for a rehost such that is has the BORROW keyword in it for our features that have multiple seats, we'd really love to leverage that for the occasional instances when internet connectivity is lost so that engineers can keep working without immediate access to a cloud-hosted license server.

I'd be happy to provide license file details, OS and service configuration details etc over private message to an Intel employee, but I'm posting in hope that some generalized advice may be useful to the community; I doubt our company is the only one in this boat. Thank you in advance!

[AR_A_Intel]

Hello

Good day

Welcome to INTEL forum. Based on my understanding, BORROW is not compatible with license feature. Per-understanding on your note, my guess is you would like to generate a temporary license to your laptop/pc (and the laptop/pc is not connected to the network). Yes, it is possible to generate another or second license and this is called a checkout license.

A checkout license enables portability for users with only floating seat licenses. The license administrator can issue fixed license allowing one of the users to have access to the same product licenses from the network. Please note that a checkout license is only temporary for 2-weeks period of time.

Refer to link on how to generate temporary license in Self-Service Licensing Center.

https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/programmable/us/en/pdfs/education/demonstrations/online/licensing/how-to-generate-companion-or-temporary-license.pdf  

[bradstinson]

Thank you very much for taking the time to respond Mr. Rahman, I really appreciate it.

If the BORROW keyword is deprecated in favor of temporary licenses, then that helps clarify things. It does sound limiting, however; with the BORROW keyword, it sounded like engineers could check-out individual seats on a license, whereas a temporary license has to be created for every user/seat that would need temporary access. That's a bit more cumbersome, but I'll take what I can get.

Would you be willing to help me with question 2, in particular? Does generating a new (regular) license file cause the previous license file to stop working? I'd be willing to accept a yes or no answer as a solution to this thread. Thank you again very much for the support.

[AR_A_Intel · Accepted solution]

Hi

Upon checking with teammate, Yes, generating new license file will probably stop previous license to stop.

[AR_A_Intel]

I hope all is well. We have not heard from you and I hope that my last note clears up this matter. This thread will be transitioned to community support. If you have a new question, feel free to open a new thread to get the support from Intel experts. Otherwise, the community users will continue to help you on this thread. Thank you