Port licenses for each Cisco UCS fabric interconnect are factory installed and shipped with the hardware. At a minimum, each fabric interconnect ships with the following counted licenses pre-installed:
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Cisco UCS 6120XP fabric interconnect—pre-installed licenses for the first eight Ethernet ports enabled in Cisco UCS Manager and any Fibre Channel ports on expansion modules
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Cisco UCS 6140XP fabric interconnect—pre-installed licenses for the first sixteen Ethernet ports enabled in Cisco UCS Manager and any Fibre Channel ports on expansion modules
Port licenses are not bound to physical ports. When you disable a licensed port, that license is then retained for use with the next enabled port.
If you want to use additional fixed ports, you must purchase and install licenses for those ports.
Grace Period
If you attempt to use a port that does not have an installed license,
Cisco UCS initiates a 120 day grace period. The grace period is measured from the first use of the port without a license and is paused when a valid license file is installed. The amount of time used in the grace period is retained by the system.
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Each physical port has its own grace period. Initiating the grace period on a single port does not initiate the grace period for all ports.
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If a licensed port is unconfigured, that license is transferred to a port functioning within a grace period. If multiple ports are acting within grace periods, the license is moved to the port whose grace period is closest to expiring.
High Availability Configurations
To avoid inconsistencies during failover, we recommend that both fabric interconnects in the cluster have the same number of ports licensed. If symmetry is not maintained and failover occurs, Cisco UCS enables the missing licenses and initiates the grace period for each port being used on the failover node.