Licensing

The software license agreement to operate the Altair Accelerator software is enforced by either a standalone license file or a floating license checked out from a license server.

There are 3 licensing modes supported by Accelerator products:
  • Altair License Manager floating licenses
  • Standalone license file – Altair license file
  • Standalone license file – legacy key file

The software component that checks out a license is vovserver, which applies license accounting rules and requests the type of license that is appropriate for the individual Accelerator product, together with the number of taskers, users, or other relevant data. When a standalone license file is in effect, the correct license authorization is checked in that file. When a floating license is in effect a shareable license is checked out from the license server.

Standalone License File

A standalone license file allows operation of Accelerator products without the need to run an Altair license server to dole out floating licenses. It is most suitable for a situation where a single VOV project will run on a dedicated computer system or node. A standalone license file will typically unlock the ability to run an Accelerator product instance on a specified host and port.

Use of standalone license files are simpler to deploy since an Altair License Server is not needed. Also, standalone license files can be more reliable because they do not depend on the network for licensing validation.

Floating License Server

An Altair License server (also referred to an “LMX” server for historical reasons) is installed and run to serve floating Accelerator product licenses. This approach allows license authorization rights to float between users and hosts. A customer site will have some number of license seats that are exclusively allocated to different Accelerator product instances.

Grace Periods

If any of the license files are missing or has expired, a grace period of 5 days is offered in which the product can run normally.

Grace period is activated for all license types upon these conditions:
  • License has expired.
  • License cannot be obtained at any point after at least one successful license checkout has occurred.
    • For floating licenses, this can be anything from a network/routing error to a power cord being unplugged on the license server host.
    • For node-locked licenses, this could only be if the license was deleted or modified while vovserver is running.
At the end of the grace period, Accelerator stops dispatching jobs and Monitor obfuscates all checkout information saved to the log files, and does not load it into the DB.
Note: The grace period does not apply when a new license file is installed; the newly installed license file is quickly detected should the previous license expire or otherwise go bad.

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