License Administration Guide - norsar

Chapter 16: Licensing in a Cloud-Computing EnvironmentUse Cases for Licensing Software in the CloudLicense Administrator Tasks for Case 2Generally, license administration for virtual appliances is handled by the software publisher. Contact the softwarepublisher for any tasks you might have to perform.Case 3: Traditional Served and Unserved Licensing in aVirtual Private CloudA virtual private cloud (VPC) is a portion of the public cloud that forms the private cloud for a specific corporateenterprise. The enterprise deploys all of its network security policies on this VPC by establishing a secure tunnelingmechanism (a virtual private network, or VPN) between the corporate network and the cloud components. Thismodel is popular with enterprises who are concerned about security issues associated with the public cloud. Cloudproviders, such as Amazon EC2, typically charge for both VPC machine-instance usage and for data crossing theVPN tunnel.Basic VPC Licensing ScenarioA secure and cost-effective scenario for this use case is to run the license server in the cloud, deploy theFlexEnabled application as one or more license clients in the cloud, and run the license-server binding agent(lmbind) on a physical machine in the enterprise data center. Advantages to this setup include the following:• License enforcement is based on the bare-metal binding (BMB) method, which FlexNet Publisher introducedfor non-cloud virtual environments in a previous release. Binding the license file to a physical machineprovides more license protection than binding the file to a virtual machine instance.• In a non-cloud virtual environment, the BMB method requires that you run lmbind on the physical machinehosting the virtual machine instance on which the license server runs. This requirement limits BMB support toHyper-V and VMware virtual environments, which have the console operating systems necessary for runninglmbind. However, in the VPC environment, this setup is virtual-machine-vendor independent. That is, you canrun lmbind separately on any physical Windows or Linux machine in the enterprise; and the license server canrun on any machine instance whose operating system is by the FlexNet Publisher license servers.• While you can always run the license server on a physical machine in the enterprise data center, the server hashigher availability inside the cloud environment. By contrast, the lmbind agent requires less availability and isbetter suited for a physical machine in the data center; it is needed only at license-server startup and forheartbeat connections with the server, which are set at configurable intervals.• The data transferred between lmbind and the license server is a fraction of the data that is transferred betweenthe license server and the application. Because VPC providers typically charge by the amount of data thatcrosses the VPN gateway, the more cost-effective option is to host lmbind, but not the server, inside theenterprise data center.License Administration Guide FNP-11111-LAG01 195