Manage license reservation (flmprg)

You can use the Four Js License Manager (FLM) license reservation feature to reserve licenses for a group of users or for an application.

When you reserve licenses for a group or application, you take those licenses out of circulation from the pool of available licenses. Only licenses left over – or unreserved – can be used by general users of your applications. Therefore, you must take care when reserving licenses from the pool of available licenses, because reserving licenses removes those licenses from the general set of licenses available.

License reservation does not apply to CPU licenses. For more information on license types, see How Genero Licensing Works.

Scenarios of license reservations

  1. You have 100 licenses. You reserve 10 licenses for Web service users so that they can always access the service. Users can still access applications because the remaining 90 licenses are not reserved; however, only a maximum of 90 non-Web service users can get a license simultaneously, as 10 licenses are always reserved for Web service.
  2. You have 100 licenses, 10 are reserved for Web services, and 15 are reserved for the QA department so that testers can always have access for testing. A total of 25 licenses are reserved; 75 licenses are available for other users that want to use your applications.

Planning for license reservations

Important:

License reservation works with Genero 3.21 products or greater, and with Genero 3.20 and 3.10 products when they are run in compatibility mode with license controller (fglWrt/greWrt) v6.00.13 or greater.

Identify how you want to reserve licenses:
  • by designated user group such as developers, testers, and so on
  • by users accessing specific applications such as web services
  • by environment (different Genero product versions using the same FLM)
  • by GAS dispatcher, and so on.
The configuration for license reservation involves the FLM configuration file and the license controller configuration file on the client side:

Shared licenses are also supported with reserved licenses. For an example of reserving shared licenses, go to Reserve shared licenses.

Adding or modifying license reservations

Modifying a license reservation requires a restart of the FLM service. Modifying a license reservation may impact active users.
  • If you remove a license reservation, all active sessions that were using that license reservation are killed on restart of the FLM service.
  • If you configure a reservation, and there exists too many active sessions to meet the reservation number, some active sessions will be killed. For example, if you have 80 active sessions out of 100 available licenses, and you configure a reservation for 30 users, at the FLM restart, the reservation will be active, but 10 active sessions will be killed.

Setting an expiry date

You can configure an expiry date for when the a reservation becomes inactive. The reservation is no longer usable after that date. The date can be changed, to re-enable it. The following example shows a license reservation configuration entry in the FLM configuration file (FLMDIR/etc/flmprofile).
[reservation.qa]
license=TAB#XXXXXXXX
count=15
expiry-date=2023/12/31