Description

Cisco Smart Account

Cisco Smart Account is an account where all products enabled for Smart Licensing are deposited. 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.

When creating a Smart Account, you must have the authority to represent the requesting organization. After you submit the request, it goes through a brief approval process. Access http://software.cisco.com to learn about, set up, or manage Smart Accounts.

Cisco Smart Software Manager enables you to manage all your Cisco Smart software licenses from one centralized website. With Cisco Smart Software Manager, you organize and view your licenses in groups called virtual accounts (collections of licenses and product instances). Use the Cisco Smart Software Manager to do these tasks:

• Create, manage, or view virtual accounts.

• Create and manage Product Instance ID Tokens.

• Transfer licenses between virtual accounts or view licenses.

• Transfer, remove, or view product instances.

• Run reports against your virtual accounts.

• Modify your email notification settings.

• View overall account information.

Virtual Accounts

A Virtual Account exists as a subaccount tithing 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.

Smart Licensing allows you to create multiple license pools or virtual accounts within the Smart Software Manager portal. Using the Virtual Accounts option that you can aggregate licenses into discrete bundles that are associated with a cost center so that one section of an organization cannot use the licenses of another section of the organization.

For example, if you segregate your company into different geographic regions, you can create a virtual account for each region to hold the licenses and product instances for that region.

All new licenses and product instances are placed in the default virtual account in the Smart Software Manager, unless you specify a different one during the order process. After you access the default account, you may choose to transfer them to any other account, provided you have the required access permissions.

Use the Smart Software Manager portal to create license pools or transfer licenses.

Product Instance ID Tokens

ID tokens are stored in the Product Instance ID Token Table that is associated with your enterprise account. ID tokens can be valid 1-365 days.

Product Instances

A product instance is an individual device with a unique device identifier (UDI) that is registered using a product instance ID token (or ID token). You can register any number of instances of a product with a single ID token. Each product instance can have one or more licenses residing in the same virtual account. Product instances must periodically connect to the Cisco Smart Software Manager servers during a specific renewal period. If you remove the product instance, its licenses are released and made available within the virtual account.