Upgrade licenses let you add licenses for software features that a customer buys after the initial purchase of a license, without changing the original license. Upgrade licenses increase the license count of exclusive licenses by a particular number of licenses, while simultaneously being completely transparent to the client. This approach allows for more flexibility in handling license add-ons than additive licenses do, because additive licenses are seen as a separate license pool of the same feature.

The license server automatically activates or deactivates upgrade licenses at midnight, and may be limited using the START and END directives in the same way as for other license types.  You can also create a perpetual (non-expiring) upgrade license, as long as the exclusive license it is based on is perpetual. Also note that existing sessions remain unaffected when an upgrade license expires.

You can upgrade a particular exclusive license as many times as necessary, as long as COUNT is within its range. It will sum up all of the license upgrades, allowing for a different expiration date for each upgrade.

An upgrade license can be locked to the license server HostIDs to prevent using the same upgrade license on more than one machine. Duplicated instances of an upgrade license within one license server will be discarded.

Upgrade licenses have the following limitations:

• The upgrade license's expiration dates must be within the exclusive license's expiration dates. 
• Neither the upgrade nor exclusive license can be unlimited.
• Client HostIDs are not supported for upgrade licenses, and LMX_GetLicenseInfo will not report upgrade licenses in network or local paths. These limitations exist because the upgrade licenses are designed to be transparent to the client. However, exclusive licenses report their upgraded license count in both LMX_GetFeatureInfo and LMX_GetLicenseInfo.

License template

To create an upgrade license, create a feature with the same feature name as the original license, set the number of licenses using the COUNT directive, and set KEYTYPE="UPGRADE" in the XML license template file. 

In addition to the feature name, COUNT and KEYTYPE settings that are required by the license generator to create an upgrade license, the optional settings that may be used with upgrade licenses are START, END, SHARE, HOSTID_MATCH_RATE, HAL_SERVERS and server HostIDs.

To maintain maximum compatibility with the corresponding exclusive license, the settings allowed in the upgrade license template are limited. All of the settings behave the same as for exclusive licenses, except that SHARE is limited to VIRTUAL only.

Example

The following license template would result in an upgrade license that increases the feature "f1" license count by one, and is valid from the license server startup to 2030-01-01.

<LICENSEFILE>
  <FEATURE NAME="f1">
    <SETTING COUNT="1"/>
    <SETTING KEYTYPE="UPGRADE"/>
    <SETTING END="2030-01-01"/>
  </FEATURE>
</LICENSEFILE>