Capacity Licensing Concepts

Let’s review basic licensing concepts introduced earlier in this guide.

>Hard Limit – To create license code using the WlscGen or lscgen license code generator, you must specify how many copies of the license can be used at one time. This is known as the hard limit, and usually reflects the number of different clients who can use the license at the same time. You can also think of this as the number of computers that can run the licensed software at one time.

NOTE   From RMS v9.5 onwards, hard limit up to 4,294,967,294 is supported. This is applicable for license version 20 and above. Further, this high value is applicable only when the hard limit is used as a quantity.

>License Token – Each copy of the license permitted by the hard limit is known as a token. Each client normally uses one token of the license.

>Sharing – Each token can be used by multiple clients if sharing is enabled. The group of clients that can share a token are identified by a common element, such as same user ID. Sharing is often used to allow multiple clients (having same user name/host name/X display name/defined name) to run the application without consuming more than one token.

Developers find that most of their licensing needs can be satisfied by using the hard limit and sharing concepts above.

However, if you want to create complex licensing models, capacity licensing provides an additional layer by building on these concepts. Capacity licensing allows you to specify the number of operations a token user can perform. Capacity licensing enables the end user to use an extra flag along with the hard limit to control the number of applications that can run simultaneously.

Refer to the following sections for capacity licensing concepts and examples related to using capacity licenses.