DISCONNECT A LICENSE

[JohnWM]

Sometimes your clients need to travel or temporarily leave your network.  The Disconnected License was created for just such a purpose.  This document shows you the steps to disconnect (or reconnect) a license.

This exclusive Community Page training is provided as part of NI's ongoing committment to help you as a Volume License Administrator.  Thank you Administrators!

[mtru]

Thanks, this is very helpful!  Question.  If you create a disconnect license to last, say, for a month.  Does the VLM count that entire month as that license being in used by the person/computer it was given to since it is now disconnected from the VLM for tracking?

[JohnWM]

Thank you for your question.  If you disconnect a license it will reduce the pool of available licenses.  The pool of available licenses will not be replenished until the client reconnects back to the VLM Server.  In your example if you disconnect a license on Jan 1 and it stays disconnected until Jan 31 then the pool will be reduced for the entire month.

[mtru]

Thank you for the quick response.  As I understand it, the VLM server tracks usage of AVAILABLE licenses in the pool.  A feature I would like to have is a way to include disconnected licenses in the usage calculations/reports the VLM generates.  We bill by business unit for our licenses based on usage.  If a business unit requests and uses a disconnected license, the usage data (unless I am mistaken) does not reflect this, making it difficult to objectively calculate ACTUAL license usage by that business unit who is using a disconnected license.  It would be nice to have a feature in VLM that would allow us to have the VLM to consider a disconnected license to be in use 100% of the time it is disconnected, giving an incentive to our users to NOT to use disconnected licenses and create an incentive to stay "on the network" to track their actual usage.

[JohnWM]

I appreciate the feedback and the suggestion to improve the VLM tool.  Today (you are correct in stating) the disconnected licenses are not included in the usage reporting.  I have heard from your fellow administrators about this very topic and it seems different organization have different needs regarding disconnected licenses.  As we are able to make enhancements to reporting within the VLM tool we will strongly consider your propsoal.  Thank you again for the feedback.

[Anna_23]

When you consider this I would like to add the following issue.

We have Named user and Computer based licenses only. Due to this there are no free licenses to count. But I would very much like to know how much the licenses are actually used by online computers. In this case I may or may not want to count disconnected licenses as "beeing in use".

Doing this I want Named user and Computer based licenses for the same product to be counted together, since they are interchangable.

I might be able to convert some of the licenses to floating and allow more users without the need to buy more licenses.

[johnwhitcraft]

Hello Team,

BAE Systems uses disconnected license files for computers which have to be "air gapped" from the network.

There appears to be a BUG in the system of disconnected licenses installed in the license manager.

Suppose you want to check when the disconnected license will expire using the license manager.

The license manager shows the red box and indicates the license has expired.

Never-the-less the software is working correctly with the disconnected license.

When will NI.com fix this problem?

Regards,

John Whitcraft, PE

858-229-8722