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CPS 10.0.0 and its later releases support Smart Licensing. It is a cloud-based approach to licensing that simplifies the purchase, deployment, and management of Cisco software assets. Entitlements are purchased through your Cisco account via Cisco Commerce Workspace (CCW) and immediately deposited into your Virtual Account for usage. This eliminates the need to install license files on every device. Products that are smart enabled communicate directly to Cisco to report consumption. A single location is available to customers to manage Cisco software licenses—the Cisco Smart Software Manager (CSSM). License ownership and consumption are readily available to help make better purchase decision based on consumption or business need.
Classic Licensing is Cisco’s legacy licensing model based on Product Activation Keys (PAK) and Unique Device Identifiers (UDI). On most IOS devices, a determination of bandwidth needs is assessed prior to obtaining and installing a tar file on the platform to retrieve the UDI. A PAK is ordered and typically emailed to the customer. The combination of a UDI and PAK are used to receive a license file, which is installed in the boot directory to complete the installation of IOS on the platform. The License Registration Portal (LRP) is available to help migrate Classic Licenses to Smart Licenses. To access the LRP, and to obtain training and manage licenses, visit http://tools.cisco.com/SWIFT/LicensingUI/Home.
The following sections provide a comparison of the existing CPS SWIFT-based licensing model, the Cisco Smart Software Licensing model, and Cisco Smart Software Licensing as it is implemented in CPS 10.0.0 and later releases.
For CPS versions prior to 10.0.0, CPS licensing is SWIFT "lmgrd" based, and the license is tied to the MAC address of the device on which CPS is installed. The following list summarizes the CPS SWIFT-based licensing model:
The License count that is purchased by the customer is defined in the license.lic file and is read into the CPS application using the lmgrd/cisco processes.
License compliance is determined and tracked by CPS. CPS periodically compares the current session count with the licensed count at a predefined interval.
CPS creates and logs license statuses: adhere, "RATE_LIMITED" and "VALID" statuses are logged with proper messages, and traps are generated accordingly.
The following list summarizes the Cisco Smart Software License model:
Smart Licensing maintains and tracks license information including license quantity, license surplus, and shortage usages.
There is no API for returning the number of licenses (entitlements) purchased by the customer.
License compliance is determined and tracked by Cisco Smart Software License. Entitlement enforcement mode notifications will send out when it is changed upon the request.
License (entitlement) expiration is tracked by Cisco Smart Software License. There is no API for returning the license expiration date.
Smart Licensing does not support license version.
Utility/Metering is not supported.
An entitlement consumption request is allowed once every 24 hours maximum.
Smart Licensing supports high availability. For Smart Agent clusters, one Smart Agent is active and the rest are standbys. This means that for a given cluster, only one Smart Agent is active, and it will register to the Smart Licensing portal at any time. (Smart License is a combination of Smart Agent and Smart Call Home, which is responsible for communicating to Cisco Smart Software Licensing.)
The following list summarizes the Cisco Smart Software License model for CPS 10.0.0 and greater:
For a CPS high availability installation, only the active client (either pcrfclient01 or pcrfclient02) is registered to the Smart Licensing Portal at any given time, and it uses the same identify for the registration.
CPS uses the Smart Licensing API to request the entitlement (license) consumption amount based on the pre-defined maximum licensed concurrent session amount.
The predefined maximum licensed concurrent session amount is defined in the features.properties file for each CPS feature.
One licensed entitlement count is equivalent to one CPS Policy concurrent session count.
Smart Licensing Entitlement notifies CPS about the requested entitlement conformance (enforce mode) if the requested entitlement consumption is InCompliance or OutCompliance or Eval, meaning that the product instance is not registered to the Smart Licensing Portal and is running in evaluation mode. CPS populates license data into mongoDB: shardding/licensedfeats <SITEID> collection based on the received entitlement compliance status.
The Smart Agent (SA) is embedded in CPS+SL (SA+SCH) integration. A CLI is supported.
CPS Orchestration API-based installation is not supported.
Dynamically switching the license manager from lmgrd to Smart Licensing or vise versa is supported. Switching the licensing manager requires a restart of CPS OAM (pcrfclient).
CPS Smart Licensing integration follows the CPS In-Service Software Upgrade process.
In summary, CPS 10.0.0 and later releases support the same functionality as CPS SWIFT imgrd-based licensing with the following exceptions:
There is no API to return the license amount available for the virtual account. A new “complianceMode” attribute has been added to indicate the requested feature entitlement compliance status with the following value options:
There is no API to return the license expiration date. The license expiration date value will set to “current date + 10 years future date” in CPS 10.0.0 and later releases.
Smart Licensing does not support license version. Currently, the license version is set to “V1.0” in CPS.
A Smart Account provides a single location for all Smart-enabled products and entitlements. It helps speed procurement, deployment, and maintenance of Cisco Software. When creating a Smart Account, you must have the authority to represent the requesting organization. After submitting, the request goes through a brief approval process.
A Virtual Account exists as a sub-account withing the Smart Account. Virtual Accounts are a customer-defined structure based on organizational layout, business function, geography or any defined hierarchy. They are created and maintained by the Smart Account administrator.
See http://software.cisco.com to learn about, set up, or manage Smart Accounts.
A Cisco Smart Account is an account where all products enabled for Smart Licensing are deposited. A Cisco Smart Account allows you to manage and activate your licenses to devices, monitor license use, and track Cisco license purchases. Through transparent access, you have a real-time view into your Smart Licensing products. IT administrators can manage licenses and account users within your organization's Smart Account through the Smart Software Manager.
Cisco Smart Software Manager (CSSM) enables the management of software licenses and Smart Account from a single portal. The interface allows you to activate your product, manage entitlements, and renew and upgrade software. A functioning Smart Account is required to complete the registration process. To access the Cisco Smart Software Manager, see https://software.cisco.com/.
Using the License Registration Portal, you can convert classic licenses that are associated with Product Activation Keys (PAKs) to smart entitlements.
You can enable smart licensing after upgrading CPS, or after a new CPS deployment.
Note | These steps must be performed on the Cluster Manager VM. |
Tags for the following PIDs have been created to enable the proper product IDs to be identified, reported, and enforced.
PID |
Entitlement Tag |
Entitlement name in CSSM |
---|---|---|
POLICY-VALUE |
regid.2016-06.com.cisco.POLICY-VALUE, 1.0_7f667e53-11e1-40e2-9480-ff7eb064561c |
CPS Value Plus Feature Pack |
POLICY-ALL |
regid.2016-06.com.cisco.POLICY-ALL, 1.0_65566461-0788-4c92-8ffa-f9a02e9843e8 |
CPS All Inclusive Feature Pack |
POLICY-UPGRADE |
regid.2016-06.com.cisco.POLICY-UPGRADE, 1.0_8fa236bc-e481-4673-aa4d-7da8f707647c |
CPS Upgrade from Value Plus to All Inclusive Feature Pack |
POLICY-ADD |
regid.2016-06.com.cisco.PCRF-ADD, 1.0_676d51ca-4e14-40b3-81e7-1a600d726ce7 |
CPS PCRF Application License - Additional Applications |
The following sections describe the commands that you can use to register, view information for, and manage Smart Licenses on your CPS systems.
Note | These commands must be run on the active pcrfclient. |
You must issue the following command to register your Smart License:
license smart register idtoken <token> [force]
This command registers the device with Cisco using an ID token that you obtain from the CSSM. The agent will register this product with Cisco and receive back an identity certificate. This certificate is saved and automatically used for all future communications with Cisco. After registration it will send the current license usage information to Cisco. Every 180 days the agent will automatically renew the registration information with Cisco. The ID token is not saved on the device.
This only needs to be done once per device.
The force option will cause the device to attempt registration even if it thinks it is already registered.
You can use the following commands to view information related to your Smart License:
You can use the following commands to manage your Smart License:
license smart renew ID
Dependency – Before using this command, Smart Licensing must be registered using the license smart register idtoken command.
This command initiates a manual update of the license registration information with Cisco. Since the registration renewal is automatically done by the agent every 6 months, the customer will probably never need to use this command. It is available if for some reason the user needs to renew the registration information manually.
license smart renew auth
Dependency – Before using this command, Smart Licensing must have been registered using the license smart register idtoken command.
This command manually refreshes license authorization information with Cisco. Since the license authorization is renewed automatically by the agent every 30 days, the customer will probably never need to use this command. It is available if for some reason the user needs to renew the license authorization information manually.
license smart deregister
Dependency – Before using this command, Smart Licensing must have been registered using the license smart register idtoken command.
This command unregisters the device. The agent will try to contact the Cisco licensing cloud and unregister itself. All Smart Licensing entitlements and certificates on the platform will be removed. All certificates and registration information will be removed from the trusted store. This is true even if the agent is unable to communicate with Cisco to unregister. If the customer wants to use Smart Licensing again, they must run the license smart register idtoken command again.
The Fault list configuration in Policy Builder allows configuring the thresholds at which License Usage Threshold Exceeded traps are sent out. The default recommended values are: Critical 95, Major 90, Minor 85 and Warning 80 which would result in traps being sent at 80, 85, 90 and 95 percent for License Usage Threshold Limits.
For example, if the license limit is 10000 sessions and there are 9600 active sessions, configuring the threshold at 95 and type as Critical would generate a Critical trap whose message is Session Count License Usage at 96%, exceeding threshold: 95%.