Overview of Smart Licensing
Smart Licensing is a cloud-based, software license management solution that enables you to automate time-consuming, manual licensing tasks. The Smart Licensing solution allows you to easily track the status of your license and software usage trends.
It is a Cisco initiative to move all the licenses to the cloud. The purpose of this initiative is to simplify the license management for HCS partners and enable them to adopt Cisco’s cloud-based license management system. Smart Licensing helps in overcoming most of the limitations with the traditional PAK-based licenses. Most of the Cisco products including routing, switching, security, collaboration, and so on supports smart licensing.
Smart Licensing in HCS depends on Cisco Smart Software Manager (CSSM), Satellite, and HCM-F. In CSSM and satellite you can activate and manage all Cisco licenses. HCM-F simplifies the complexities of registration or activation of UC Applications with CSSM or Satellite, management of Smart Licenses, generate licensing reports for inventory, and billing purposes. HCM-F also provides licensing dashboards for consumption details and compliance status.
PLM is not supported for UC applications cluster versions higher than 11.x. Register all the 12.x UC applications cluster to CSSM.
HCM-F currently supports registration of UC Applications to Prime License Manager (PLM) for consuming the traditional PAK-based licenses. UC application versions 11.x or earlier supports registration through PLM. For more information about PLM, see Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution License Management.
Smart Licensing helps simplify three core functions:
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Purchasing: The software that you have installed in your network can automatically self-register themselves, without Product Activation Keys (PAKs).
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Management: You can automatically track activations against your license entitlements. Also, you do not need to install the license file on every node. You can create License Pools (logical grouping of licenses) to reflect your organization structure. Smart Licensing offers you Cisco Smart Software Manager, a centralized portal that enables you to manage all your Cisco software licenses from one centralized website.
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Reporting: Through the portal, Smart Licensing offers an integrated view of the licenses you purchased and the licenses that are deployed in your network. You can use this data to make better purchase decisions, based on your consumption.
Cisco Smart Software Licensing helps you to procure, deploy, and manage licenses easily, where devices register and report license consumption, removing the need for product activation keys (PAK). It Pools license entitlements in a single account and allow you to move licenses freely through the network, wherever you need them. It is enabled across Cisco products and managed by a direct cloud-based or mediated deployment model.
The Cisco Smart Software Licensing service registers the product instance, reports license usage, and obtains the necessary authorization from Cisco Smart Software Manager and/or Satellite.
HCM-F enables the user to perform multiple tasks, such as, change the license deployment to Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS), setting the transport mode to UC Applications, create token in CSSM, register the UC applications and validate the same, and so on. If there is a failure while performing the tasks, HCM-F collects the error messages from the UC application or CSSM, and updates the HCM-F Job entry with the issue details.
CSSM reports at smart account-level and product level. However, user information is not available at these levels. HCM-F provides the Service Inventory report and the HLM report of license usage at customer-level and virtual account level. It also provides Licensing dashboards to display the usage.
You can use Smart Licensing to:
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See the license usage and count.
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See the status of each license type.
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See the product licenses registered on Cisco Smart Software Manager and/or Cisco Smart Software Manager satellite .
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Renew License Authorization with Cisco Smart Software Manager and/or Cisco Smart Software Manager satellite .
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Renew the License Registration.
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Deregister with Cisco Smart Software Manager and/or Cisco Smart Software Manager satellite.
The deployment option for Smart Licensing:
- Cisco Smart Software Manager
- The Cisco Smart Software Manager (CSSM) is a cloud-based service that handles system licensing. HCM-F can connect to CSSM
either directly or through a proxy server. HCM-F and UC applications use the selected Transport Mode. We recommend using a
proxy server to connect to CSSM instead of connecting directly. Cisco Smart Software Manager allows you to:
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Manage and track licenses.
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Move licenses across virtual account.
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Remove registered product instance.
To track smart account-related alerts, change the preference settings, and configure email notification. Navigate to Smart Software Licensing in Cisco Smart Software Manager.
For additional information, go to https://software.cisco.com.
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- Cisco Smart Software Manager Satellite
- Cisco Smart Software Manager satellite is an on-premise deployment that can handle your licensing needs if HCM-F and UC applications cannot connect to CSSM directly, either for security or availability reasons. When this option is deployed, HCM-F registers and report license consumption to the satellite, which synchronizes its database regularly with the backend Cisco Smart Software Manager that is hosted on cisco.com.