With software pirates and so many unscrupulous or just lazy people, software companies have been forced to ensure that people are using their software assets exactly as they promised they would. Altiris does this through software licensing. In addition to that there is the Automatic Upgrade Protection (AUP) that ensures that your license will be useful for years to come.
Like any software protection scheme Altiris has their own system. This article will help you with the maintenance and management involved with Altiris licensing.
How Altiris Licenses Work
You can buy licenses for a product that plugs into the Altiris NS console or you can buy them in "levels" or "suites". There is a whole list of items that are provided without a license, but the ones you typically pay for include patch management, software delivery, application metering, and so forth. You can also get "trial licenses" (that expire at a set period of time) from your sales rep so that you can test a product. I would not suggest ever "testing" these on your production servers. Build a dev box and stay safe. Once the trial license has expired agent rollouts will still occur without a problem. However, all new incoming inventory data is discarded. Also inventory reports will throw a license error.
Licenses are used in the Altiris server after the NS has received the first software inventory data from a managed computer. A license is not consumed from the existence of the Inventory Solution agent on a managed computer and a license is not consumed by the "basic inventory" function of the Altiris Agent.
After you make the investment in your Altiris product, a sales support associate will generally e-mail you with the Altiris License Management Web site and a registration code. When you first access this site you will be asked to login. If this is your first time you will be asked for various registration information. Next you may choose the registration tab and enter the registration code that was given to you.
You should now notice a license key available on the license tab. From here on the far right you will have the option to download all license keys that you have registered. You can also select the individual licenses on left side. When you select each one it gives you details such as your AUP expiration, downloads of keys or product installers and also any activation keys that may apply. (Generally only applies to WISE products).
Combining Licenses
From this portal you also have the option of the License Workshop. The "workshop" allows you to combine NS Server Licenses. However there some things to note when you want to combine licenses.
When you combine two or more license certificates into a single combined certificate, the new AUP date that is embedded in the certificate is the earliest of all the dates on your licenses. For example if you combine 1000 nodes of a product with an AUP date ending 01/01/2008 with 1000 nodes of a product with an AUP date ending 06/01/2008 the new certificate will be created for 2000 nodes with an AUP expiration date of 01/01/2008. You may come back to the License Management Portal when the AUP expires on the combined license to receive your licenses in a new configuration. In many cases the better solution is to contact your sales representative to have your AUP dates "co-termed" to a single date. This way they all expire at the same time, you just pay a fee for the months that you want synchronized.
Automatic Upgrade Protection and Licensing
So you buy a license, but then they come out with a new version of the product. Now you have to buy a new license for that product, because Altiris does not provide upgrades. Instead they provide the Automatic Upgrade Protection like many companies do. Buying this AUP will allow you to upgrade to any new version of that product that you have licensed as long as you keep up with your AUP every year. Some products, such as Patch Management, require that you have AUP to get monthly updates from Altiris. This no-doubt helps to pay for those that have released the cab file updates that contain all the patch management rules.
We touched on it earlier but to avoid combining duplicate licenses due to early AUP renewals or as a result of co-terming AUP dates, licenses will not be combined until that AUP date has started. Because of this, your combined license may not reflect the new AUP renewal date or co-termed date. You will be able to go back into the License Management Portal and combine the keys once the AUP dates have started. If you would prefer to have your combined keys, you can request them from the licensing portal.
When Licenses are Exceeded
Each product works a little different when its license is exceeded. Here is a breakdown by product.
- Inventory Solution Inventory from licensed nodes will continue to be processed. Incoming inventory data from unlicensed nodes is discarded.
- Software Delivery Solution All agents will stop receiving new policies. (this could be really bad). Also before SWD 6.1 SP1 exceeding the license count will stop all newly or changed tasks from deploying to the client computers. This was fixes in SWD 6.1 SP1.
- Patch Management Solution All agents will stop receiving new software update policies. The Notification Server will refuse to download the pmimport.cab file that has the new patch management data from the Altiris Web site. Newly posted Inventory Rule scanning data will be silently discarded by the NS.
Recovering Licenses
Each product works a little different, but here are the basic on how to recover licenses when they are no longer use.
For inventory solution license recovery you can retire computers to free up a license. Deletion of the computer resource record will also release a license but is usually not the preferred way especially when using the Asset solution. Inventory Solution specific data on Retired computers will be purged as part of a background process that runs each night.
For the software delivery solution retiring computers will not free up a license. Computers can be deleted and then they will release a license. However by default, licenses are released 30 days after the last SWD event is sent by the licensed computer. To accelerate this, reduce Notification Server Settings > Purging Maintenance > Resource Event Data Purge Settings > Computer Events > AeX SWD Status to 7 Days or whatever time period you like. The idea is if you have stopped delivering items to the computer for 30 days you are not using the license.
For Patch Management it gets a little trickier. The official word used to be that retired computers will not release a license and that computers must be deleted to release a license. This is documented in KB28864. However there is now new KB article available on recovering Patch Management licenses from retired computers. (KB 2035)
This KB article has you run this code to find out how many licenses you could free up by removing some data from the Altiris DB: Here's the code to check on how many licenses to free up.
- This will give a grid listing of different resource states and their count of Patch Licenses
SELECT (CASE IsManaged WHEN 1 THEN 'Managed' ELSE 'Unmanaged' END) as State, Status, count(*)
FROM LicenseInUse liu
LEFT OUTER JOIN vFixedAssetResourceStatus ars ON liu.ResourceGuid = ars.Guid
WHERE ProductGuid = 'B1338338-5575-4A27-9808-23BEC40D79FA'
GROUP BY Status, IsManaged
- This will give a count of all Patch licenses consumed by unmanaged resources
SELECT count(*) as 'Number of stale licenses'
FROM LicenseInUse liu
LEFT OUTER JOIN vComputerResource cr ON liu.ResourceGuid = cr.Guid
AND IsManaged = 1
WHERE ProductGuid = 'B1338338-5575-4A27-9808-23BEC40D79FA'
AND cr.Guid IS NULL
Once you have figured out that you there are patch management licenses you need to recover you can run this code to remove the license in use flag.
- Remove unmanaged licenses
DELETE liu
FROM LicenseInUse liu
LEFT OUTER JOIN vComputerResource cr ON liu.ResourceGuid = cr.Guid
AND IsManaged = 1
WHERE ProductGuid = 'B1338338-5575-4A27-9808-23BEC40D79FA' AND cr.Guid IS NULL
The KB article also suggests that once you have run this query, refresh the licensing page. If you notice that Patch Management now displays as being invalid, reinstall the Patch Management license file and refresh the Licensing page once more; your Patch Management license count should be displayed correctly. I found in my experience that you may have to reload other licenses for them to display properly.
Hopefully this article will help you to use the licenses you have effectively, and not run into any situations where you exceed your licenses.
If you find things aren't working correctly be sure to check your Licensing page in Altiris and look for the OK on the far right.