Manage license sharing (flmprg)

You can use the Four Js License Manager (FLM) license sharing feature to share licenses for a group of users.

The share license feature of FLM 6.00 provides an option to improve the availability of licenses for users, and gives you more flexibility in terms of license management.
Important:

Shared licenses are not supported in Genero installations prior to 3.21 running in compatibility mode with FLM 6. Trying to use a license share in compatibility mode will raise an error.

Scenarios when you may need to share licenses

In a typical Genero installation ($FGLDIR), you can install only one license, and one license may be all that you require. Even if you are using FLM, your environment only needs to point to that one license. However, these are situations when there are advantages to using a license share:

  • You have multiple licenses of a Genero product and you wish to share these between users. A shared licensing pool can be configured so users can use all available licenses.
  • You need to add a new license. For example, you can add a license to an existing share without affecting those using licenses.

Configuring license shares

Identify how you want to share licenses: whether for a designated user group, users accessing specific applications, by environment (different Genero BDL versions using the same FLM), by GAS dispatcher, and so on.

The configuration for sharing licenses involves the FLM configuration file and the license controller configuration file on the client side:

How are shared licenses consumed?

When the DVM requests a license, the FLM allocates a license in the share. The FLM will try each license of the share until one is valid. If the first license has all its users allocated, then FLM tries the second license, and so on, until one is valid. If no license is available, then the standard error is raised:
Program stopped at 'demo.4gl', line number 21.
FORMS statement error number -6000.
 FLM-56 - User limit exceeded. Cannot run this program.
If the user is allocated a license, this license will be used until the end of the session. The special options that apply to the license, such as the maintenance/subscription, expiry date, and so on, will be applied.

License sharing conditions and restrictions

  • License sharing does not apply to CPU licenses.
  • Licenses must be of the same type; a runtime license must be shared with a runtime license, a development license must be shared with a development license.
  • Perpetual licenses and Subscription licenses can be shared.
  • A license can only be part of one share.
For more information on license types, see How Genero Licensing Works.

Reserving a license share

Shared licenses are also supported with reserved licenses. When you reserve a license, you set aside a number of licenses (a user count) for a designated usage. Users are reserved in as many licenses as declared in the shared license list. For more information on license reservation, go to Reserve shared licenses.

Adding or modifying license sharing

Modifying a license share requires a restart of the FLM service. Modifying a license share may impact active users.

If you remove a license share, all active sessions that were using that license share are killed on restart of the FLM service.