2009/11/27 JoeBilish <bilishr at hotmail.com>: > Hi All, > ?? we are triying to associate licenses with the ldom and machine. > ?? they can use for sub-capacity and shared-capacity licensing purposes. > ?? The concept is that customer can create a ldom that use fraction of > the machine processor and we provide a license locked to that ldom. > ?? or we provide a machine level license locked to whole physical machine. > ldom created on the same machine can share the machine level license. > > ? To implement this. we need a machine and ldom identifier. > Also, we need to get those identifiers and processor number of the machine > and ldom from within ldom. > > ? Is there any way to get those information?
By doing these types of things, you are preventing your customers from using many of the benefits of virtualization. I think that your intended licensing scheme only supports segregation of workloads. Virtualization is also done for the purposes of providing application agnostic failover (in the event of hardware failure or planned maintenance), dynamic capacity management (the network on box A is saturated, let's move ldoms 1, 2, and 9 to a different box), and optimized asset management (lease on box B is up, let's migrate ldoms to its replacement). Node locked licenses were a pain to deal with 10 years ago. Today they mess up virtualization management strategies enough that it forces node-locked applications to specific devices. This quite likely leads to underutilized dedicated hardware. That, in effect, drives up the customer's cost of deploying your software while driving down the customer's ability to manage the underlying OS and hardware platform using their or industry best practices. As much of a pain as FlexLM is for some to manage, a floating "number of seats" (number of CPU's, gigabytes of RAM, etc.) based license is much more palatable. In either scheme, you need to trust your customer at some point (and leverage appropriate copyright laws as required). License management software can be very helpful for customers that don't want to exceed their license limitations. Customers (or non-customers) that want to defeat your license management software can do so in a variety of ways, ranging from faking host ID's to editing the machine code in your executables to have the licenseCheck() function always say "unlimited permanent license". (For the record, I do not advocate violating license terms.) -- Mike Gerdts http://mgerdts.blogspot.com/
