The information on this page refers to LM-X License Manager 4.9 or newer, which introduced support for licensing cloud applications for Microsoft Azure and Google Compute Engine (GCE). If you are running a previous version of License Statistics, please see documentation for previous versions. |
Licensing your software to run on virtual machines or in a cloud environment carries special considerations, as described below.
You can install a license server on a virtual machine. To do this, enable support for virtual machines in the license file.
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.
Virtual machine environments are typically undesirable for use with software licensing. Normally, operating systems running in virtual environments are designed to be hardware independent, so Ethernet or harddisk HostIDs no longer specify physical hardware identifiers. Duplicating the virtual machines and modifying the HostIDs is simple and takes minutes to perform.
However, you may choose to explicitly allow your application to run in a virtual environment (for example, limited to use by trusted and enterprise customers) by specifying theĀ SHARE keyword VIRTUAL for the particular feature (see FEATURE settings for details on setting the virtual share option in your license.)
You may also allow trial licenses to run on a virtual machine using LMX_OPT_TRIAL_VIRTUAL_MACHINE, described in LMX_SetOption.
There are a number of ways that LM-X makes it safe for you to deliver your application for use on virtual machines:
LM-X End-user Utility v3.4
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BIOS: Phoenix Technologies LTD - UNKNOWN
Hostid: VMware-42321a30c22ce364-aca97bac6ea0bdb8
When using Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure, or Google Compute Engine (GCE), you can use the Instance ID for the HostID (see HostID values). However, for other cloud service providers, virtual machines do not have HostIDs. To solve this problem: