Licensing your software to run on virtual machines or in a cloud environment carries special considerations, as described below.
Virtual machine licensing
By default, LM-X denies all checkouts for local licenses in virtual environments, such as VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, and VirtualBox, and refuses to load licenses on license servers to prevent potential license overuse.
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You may also allow trial licenses to run on a virtual machine using LMX_OPT_TRIAL_VIRTUAL_MACHINE, described in LMX_SetOption.
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- Use floating licenses. Your software can be safely allowed to run on a virtual machine, because the license server, which is located on a physical machine, will ensure there is no license overuse.
- Use dongles. If your customer wants a license server running on a virtual machine, you can lock the license server to a dongle, which is a physical device that locks the application to the machine on which it's installed. Dongles, which may be obtained from X-Formation, provide adequate security to prevent cloning of the license server.
- Lock the license to a BIOS HostID. This solution works for both local licenses and network licenses. The BIOS on most virtual machines is unique, because it contains a unique virtual machine ID (UUID). An example is shown below:
LM-X End-user Utility v3.4Copyright (C) 2002-2010 X-Formation. All rights reserved.BIOS: Phoenix Technologies LTD - UNKNOWNHostid: VMware-42321a30c22ce364-aca97bac6ea0bdb8
Note that the UUID can easily be changed, so this is not an entirely secure solution. However, if the virtual machine is connected to a management control solution (such as VMware vCenter), duplication of UUID's is typically not permitted and causes problems for real-life production setups.
Licensing for cloud applications
When using Amazon EC2, you can use the Instance ID for the HostID (see HostID values). However, for other cloud service providers, such as Microsoft Azure, virtual machines do not have HostIDs. To solve this problem:
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