Enabling product license management

Before you can use the product, you need to create a license server, configure the master domain manager to contact it and map the license entitlements.

HCL Workload Automation uses a pay-per-use licensing model. Statistics of successfully completed jobs are stored on the Flexera server for monitoring and compliance verification.

HCL Workload Automation needs to be configured so that it can communicate data about license consumption to the Flexera server. If the license server cannot be contacted, the information is stored locally and an error message is displayed. If the license server cannot be contacted for more than 14 days in a row, all product functions are suspended.

Users of the software will be authorized to use the software up to the allocation of entitlement you made on the server. A message is displayed if the entitlement has been consumed.

Before you get started, you should become familiar with the following concepts:
Entitlement
An entitlement is a license item associated to an activation ID, a quantity of jobs, an expiry date and the assigned customer.
Device
A device is a storage system that contains the total quantity or a quota of the quantity of one or more entitlements.
Permanent license
A license which expires when you have consumed all the jobs you are entitled to, with no expiration date.
Term license
A license which expires on a set date, also if you have not consumed all the jobs you are entitled to.

License mapping

You can assign to a device a quota or the total quantity of licenses available from one or more entitlements. Each HCL Workload Automation master domain manager can contact only one device, while multiple master domain managers can contact the same devices.

All master domain managers contacting the same device are contributing to consume the assigned quantity. A strategy to limit consumption for a specific HCL Workload Automation environment is to create a separate device for the environment and assign to it only the desired quota of the available licenses.

If you have a permanent license, ensure you map also a term license in the main environment.

Note: Assigning a license to a device is a permanent operation and cannot be undone.

High-level procedure

Perform the following high-level steps to configure HCL Workload Automation to work with the license server:
  1. Search for the license:
    1. In License and Download Portal, navigate to Activation and Entitlements -> List entitlement to find the license.
    2. Select (do not click) and copy the activation ID of any HCL Workload Automation license you want to map. Take a note of all the IDs you copy.
  2. Create the device:
    1. In License and Download Portal, navigate to Devices-> Create device.
    2. Specify a name of your choice for the device.
    3. Select the Runs license server? checkbox.
    4. Select the Cloud checkbox.
    5. Specify a name of your choice for the site.
    6. Click Save.
  3. Map the license. When you create a device or click on a specific device in the device list, the Device details page is displayed:
    1. Click on the action button and select Map by activation ID.
    2. Paste the activation IDs you previously copied into the field and click Validate. A table is displayed containing one license for each mapped entitlement.
    3. In the table, assign a quantity to be mapped for each entitlement on this device. Note that 1 unit corresponds to 100 jobs.
    4. Click Save. You have successfully configured your licenses.
    5. Take note of the License Server ID, which you will need to provide using the licenseServerId parameter when installing the master domain manager, as described in Installing the master domain manager and backup master domain manager.

More than one master can share the same license server ID. In this case, all jobs running in different environments concur to consume the entitlements associated to the one license server.

You can change the number of license servers and the related license assignments at any time by accessing the HCL License Portal.

If the master domain manager cannot connect to the Internet, you can set up a proxy server to allow the master domain manager to contact the license server using the licenseProxyPassword and licenseProxyServer global options. For more information about setting global options, see Setting global options.

For more information about how licenses are tracked and how to generate a report that summarizes your monthly per-job license usage, see License computation model.

Also see the following topics for additional configuration scenarios for license server and master domain manager: