Incompatible ALS products

The problem

There is an existing AVEVA Licensing System (ALS) issue where the licenses for some combinations of products can conflict. The conflict occurs when:

• Two or more products are to be licensed on the same ALS license server at the same time

• There is at least one feature that is common to both products

• The common feature is configured in a Special Product Group (also known as a Grouped Bundle or Package) in one product but not the other.

Explanation

The problem arises if the feature is configured in different ways for the two products, because ALS does not know which configuration to use for licensing that feature. ALS resolves this conflict by ignoring one of the license lines for the duration of the overlap.

Example

• FLEX-UENG-001 (AVEVA E3D Design) contains features AVEVA201 and AVEVA896

• FLEX-MAR-012 (AVEVA E3D Design & Outfitting Bundle) contains these same features in group SPG_E3D_OUTFITTING.

If you order 4 seats of FLEX-UENG-001 and 6 seats of FLEX-MAR-012 on the same AVEVA Licensing Server for the same period the license is generated, but at licensing time the ALS randomly selects just one of the products to deliver these features. The result is you get either 4 seats of FLEX-UENG-001 or 6 seats of FLEX-MAR-012 but not both, though you are charged for both.

Identifying the problem

CALM now highlights these conflicts when you request a license and asks for confirmation that you really want to proceed.

Workaround

You can avoid this issue by doing one of the following:

• Consolidate the incompatible products into one with the same date range and number of seats. In the above example, rather than 4 seats of FLEX-UENG-001 and 6 seats of FLEX-MAR-012, request 10 seats of FLEX-UENG-001 or 10 seats of FLEX-MAR-012.

• Ensure that there are no overlapping time ranges for the incompatible products. For example 10 seats of FLEX-UENG-001 could end before 10 seats of FLEX-MAR-012 begin.

• Deploy the overlapping products onto different ALS servers. This may be operationally tricky because you must partition your users between the different ALS servers.