FLEXlm License Servers consolidation drive to large savings

As the world economy is going through a major turmoil and the budget for hardware and software purchasing is shrinking, managers all over the globe are searching for innovative ways to lower their expenses without hurting workers productivity. One of the "black holes" in every budget at every organization or company that use software (and who doesn't?) is the cost for software maintenance fees, which are paid annually to the software vendors. This article discusses the possibility of phenomenal savings to any budget, by performing a restructuring of the way costly software products managed via floating licenses are being used.

The promise of Floating Licenses: A floating (concurrent) license allows multiple users to share the use of a software application. However, a single license can not be used by multiple users simultaneously. When a user completes his work with the software, another user can begin using it. The promise of the Floating License concept is that shared software assets can provide for less spending, without hurting production. In reality it is rarely achieved and most organizations purchase more floating licenses than are actually needed, for lack of management tools and knowledge.

Acresso Software FLEXnet (FLEXlm) is the leading software in the field of floating licenses. FLEXnet is used by more then 2000 software vendors. Examples are: Autodesk, Borland , Cadence, EDS, Macromedia , Mathsoft, Mathworks , PTC, Rational, Softimage, Solidworks, Sybase, Synopsys, WindRiver, FreeScale, ICS, Foundry, VSNi, Tri-Pacific

Additional source of information for software vendors that use FLEXlm licensing is flexlm.wiselm.com

One of the most important principles when using floating licenses, is that as the number of license servers at use goes down, the efficiency of the network grows. In other words, when a license pool is being split between a growing amount of servers, there is a substance loss of efficiency and less users can take advantage of available licenses. So why does so many organizations use floating license servers in inefficient way?

Reasons for inefficient use of expensive floating licenses

• Historical reasons - A department bought the licenses long ago and managers tend to think of the software as the department's property.

As a result, in many organizations different departments buy duplicated licenses before exploring the option of sharing available licenses.

• Lack of good management tools - FLEXnet (FLEXlm) does not supply management tools as part of the basic package. The lack of good management tools does not allow managers to manage the licenses for best results.

• The need to keep redundant license servers, in order to avoid down time when users are unable to access licenses.

• Sometimes wide area networks are too slow to allow a user to access license servers over the WAN.
  

Successful license server consolidation require the right tools

A successful consolidation process requires careful planning and has to be based on a detailed usage information database, collected over time. Organizations that go forward with the consolidation process are often involved in difficult situations, when trying to manage the combined license pool. However by choosing the correct software tool and some careful planning, will assure the success of the consolidation while providing good license availability and savings of software maintenance fees.

Important features in management tools for license server consolidation include:

• Support for multiple servers

• Support for multiple time zones, for any of the servers or users

• Detailed usage reports

• Alerts for important events

• Billing reports for total time of usage

• Convenient web based interface
• Automatic idle license release - easy timeout setup (advance OpenLM feature)

In conclusion, for a good implementation of a floating license server consolidation program, companies require advance management tool such as Acresso FLEXnet Manager or OpenLM Utilizer. By using these types of applications, system managers should be able to simplify the process and keep tight control over license usage.



Summary

Many organizations use software systems licensed by floating license servers like FLEXnet (FLEXlm). Consolidation of Floating License Servers (FLEXlm) can save a huge amount of money over time (in annual maintenance fees and the need for less licenses overall). Listed in this article are the different reasons for the inefficient usage of this expensive resource. Consolidating the floating license server requires careful planning based on usage information which is collected over a long period of time. Software systems like Acresso FLEXnet manager or OpenLM Utilizer supply the needed features to implement the complex task.


Summary (150)

Many organizations use software systems licensed by floating license servers like FLEXnet. Consolidation of Floating License Servers can save a huge amount of money over time (in annual maintenance fees and the need for less licenses overall). Listed in this article are the different reasons for the inefficient usage of this expensive resource. Software systems like Acresso FLEXnet manager or OpenLM Utilizer supply the needed features to implement the complex task.




Consolidation of FLEXlm servers can save a huge amount of money over time but can be a very complex task. Software like [OpenLM Utilizer|http://www.openlm.com] can help you in accomplishing that.

Many organizations use software systems licensed by floating license servers like FLEXnet (FLEXlm). Consolidation of Floating License Servers (FLEXlm) can save a huge amount of money over time (in ann

We received many requests to explain the "communicating" and "non-communicating" workstations tab - so here it is:

An OpenLM Agent could be installed on end users workstations in order to allow the system to close software and release floating licenses back to the license pool when a user is inactive. So far, OpenLM Agent is installed mostly with OpenLM for ESRI ArcGIS software, since we support the TIMEOUT feature for this software.

Workstations tab in EasyAdmin was designed in order to allow an easy management of Agent installations. EasyAdmin lists the "communicating" and " non-communicating" workstations in two separate lists.

The principle is that a "workstation", as defined for OpenLM, is a workstation that used floating license that is monitored by OpenLM Server, at least once. If a workstation has never accessed any floating license and OpenLM Agent is not installed on it, then OpenLM software will not be aware of it, and it will not be listed in any of the lists.

A communicating workstation is a workstation that has an Agent and it is constantly sending out "AgentAlive" messages to OpenLM Server.

A "non-communicating" workstation is a workstation that accesses floating licenses (which are monitored by OpenLM Server) but does not send out the "AgentAlive" message to the OpenLM Server. When a workstation with an installed Agent that regularly communicates with the server misses several sequential "AgentAlive" requests, it will be also listed in the "non-communicating" list. In the current version 1.5.0, the listing of that workstation is kept in the "communicating" workstations list, but it will be changed in the next version (1.5.1) due to the confusion it is creating. In version 1.5.1, once the workstation stops communicating it will only be listed only in the "non-communicating" list.

How can the system administrator use the workstations tab?

There are many possible examples, here are a few:

• Management of the Agent software distribution: During Agent distribution proses, it is very helpful to track progress using the information displayed in this tab. The distribution process ends when the "non- communicating" list of workstations is empty.
• After distributing OpenLM Agent to all workstations, the system manager can see if any of the Agents has a software problem, wrong settings or if it was deliberately stopped for any reason.
• A great tool to locate unauthorized access to the licenses: In version 1.5.1 the list will include the workstation name, time and the last user that worked on the workstation.

Access control for EasyAdmin using Microsoft IIS

The use of OpenLM for the management of FLEXnet license servers provides a unique set of tools for managers and system administrators. Features are ranging from a simple inventory management, to usage patterns and billing reports. OpenLM EasyAdmin supplies a wide range of license statistics, FLEXnet reports and management tools. The ability to control access to EasyAdmin is very important when the tool is distributed among many users.

OpenLM includes a built in web server in order to make sure that new users are able to install the software and use EasyAdmin. Following the initial evaluation period of the software, we strongly recommend to move EasyAdmin to your preferred web server: IIS, Apache etc. Check the following article that explains how to setup OpenLM on IIS server.

IIS server supports two methods that allow you to restrict access to EasyAdmin:

1. By user - Authentication and Access control.
   
2. By Host - IP address and domain name restrictions.
   

More detailed information is available at Microsoft site: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/324274

By User - Authentication and Access control

By default, when you create a new web site it will receive the default authentication - "Enable anonymous access" which allows any user to access the web site. The following image shows the default settings of a site:

IIS server offers few authentication methods that are based on the NTFS access control lists. Access rights to EasyAdmin are determined according to the access permissions to EasyAdmin folder, as demonstrated in the following image:

The authentication methods supported by IIS are:

Integrated Windows authentication - A secured method based on Microsoft NTLM which is supported both by Microsoft Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. The user will be required to type his user name and password in a popup box and if he/she has permissions to the folder, access will be granted.
This is the highest security method but it is limited only to intranet access with a single domain.

Digest authentication for Windows domain servers - A Medium security authentication method that can be used to gain access from a network with multiple domains, or even outside the network. User and password will be encrypted when transferred over the network. This method only works with Windows domain servers.

Basic authentication - Lowest security method. Based on user credentials that are sent over the network as clear text.

.NET Passport authentication - Based on the Microsoft service, we will not discuss this method here at this point.

By Host - Restrict Access by IP Address and domain name

Alternative method for user access control is done by applying restriction according to host IP or domain. By this method the server will limit or allow access to the EasyAdmin application according to the requesting IP address or domain.

The use of IP address or domain name can be useful to limit access to a group of computers or a sub domain, which includes the system administrators. It can be easily done with IIS:

Usually, the most simple method to apply a host based access restriction is to deny access from everyone and to grant access only to a few carefully selected computers.

Summary

The implementation of access control for EasyAdmin is very simple if you serve EasyAdmin with a IIS server. There are two categories of tools, based on host or on user. The methods that are based on user authentication are more flexible and offer different levels of security, depending on the organization's needs.

The use of OpenLM for the management of FLEXnet license servers provides a unique set of tools for managers and system administrators. Features range from a simple inventory management, to usage patterns and billing reports. OpenLM EasyAdmin supplies a wide range of license statistics, FLEXnet reports and management tools. The ability to control access to EasyAdmin is very important when the application is distributed among many users.

What is expected in version 1.5.1 of OpenLM

OpenLM version 1.5.1 is focused on better license statistics for FLEXlm (FLEXnet). The new version brings improved user interface, advanced queries and a lot more FLEXnet statistics and information.

1. New report for closed software, including when, how, and more.
2. Information added to communicating agents list - agent version and user name was added.
3. Information added to the non-communicating agent list - last heartbeat and last known user.
4. The system will include full support for borrowed licenses in all the system tabs.
5. More information and new style filter was added to the Active Products tab.
6. Immense change in EasyAdmin control panel - servers statistics and system warnings.
7. Addition of a licensing tab to the server configuration form.
8. Automatic updates ability to the OpenLM Agent.
9. Information on updates to OpenLM Server software will be sent automatically to the system manager.
10. OpenLM will display warnings on problems with the floating license manager:
    
1. Near 100% usage.
2. Multiple features held by one user on more then one workstation.
3. Alerts when the FLEXlm server is not available.
   
11. Advanced filtering for all the tabs in EasyAdmin. Allow selection of multiple values to filter by and combination of fields.