Enabling product license management

Before you can use the product, you need to define 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 licensing server for monitoring and compliance verification.

HCL Workload Automation needs to be configured so that it can communicate data about license consumption to the licensing 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

After installing HCL Workload Automation, perform the following steps:
  1. Log in to MyHCL Portal using the credentials provided upon purchasing HCL Workload Automation.
  2. Browse to the Deployments page.
  3. Click Add Deployment to create a new deployment.
  4. Specify a name for your deployment and select HCL Workload Automation in the pull-down menu.
  5. Click the three dots in the tile for your deployment.
  6. Select Create Deployment Key.
  7. Save the key before closing the dialog box. This key is unique to your deployment and cannot be retrieved after closing the dialog box. If you lose the key, you will have to create a new one, at which point this one will be invalidated. Use this key when setting up the licenseRefreshToken option.
  8. Connect HCL Workload Automation to the license server by configuring the relevant optman options:
    • licenseProxyPassword
    • licenseProxyServer
    • licenseProxyServerPort
    • licenseProxyUser
    • licenseRefreshToken
    • licenseServerUrl
    For more information about configuring optman options, see Setting global options.
  9. After completing the configuration, you can check your licenses in the Subscriptions tab.

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.