Summary Data

Revision History

Overview

StarOS 21.3 and higher releases support Smart Licensing. Smart Licensing 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.

Refer to http:/​/​www.cisco.com/​c/​en/​us/​buy/​smart-accounts/​software-licensing.html for more information about Cisco Smart Licensing.

Comparison Between Legacy Licensing and Smart Licensing

Cisco employs two types of license models - Legacy Licensing and Smart Software Licensing. Legacy Licensing consists of software activation by installing Product Activation Keys (PAK) on to the Cisco product. A Product Activation Key is a purchasable item, ordered in the same manner as other Cisco equipment and used to obtain license files for feature set on Cisco Products. Smart Software Licensing is a cloud based licensing of the end-to-end platform through the use of a few tools that authorize and deliver license reporting. Smart Software Licensing leverages Smart Call Home to complete the product registration, authorization resulting in reporting services available to the end customer.

Smart Licensing in Release 21.3

Smart Licensing is disabled by default. On initial system boot, the product enters an evaluation mode for 90 days where a maximum of 1 counting license can be used.

Note	When Smart Licensing is enabled in Release 21.3, it operates in mixed mode where both Legecy and Smart Licensing is used.

• Legacy (PAK-based) licenses continue to be used for On/Off features.

• Smart licensing is used for counting each service. In Release 21.3 only the counting licenses listed below in "Entitlement Tags" are controlled by Smart Licensing. All other counting licenses use Legacy (PAK-based) licenses.

Before you begin, ensure you have:

• created a Smart Licensing/Virtual account on https://software.cisco.com

• registered products on https://software.cisco.com using the ID tokens created as part of virtual account.

• enabled a communication path between the StarOS system to the CSSM server.

By default, Smart Licensing is disabled in StarOS. To enable Smart Licensing, enter the following Config mode commands:

config
   license smart enable
   end
   

Enter the following command to verify the configuration:

show configuration | grep license

Register the system with the Product Instance Registration token provided when you registered the products on software.cisco.com using the following Exec mode command:

license smart register idtoken token

The system will now automatically report entitlement usage count to the CSSM server and receive a compliance status. This will also remove the system from "Evaluation Mode" To show the compliance status, enter any of the following Exec mode commands:

show license status
show license summary
show license statistics

The registration for the system is renewed automatically every 6 months. If needed, use the following Exec mode command to renew the registration information manually:

license smart renew id

The license authorization for the system is renewed automatically every 30 days. If needed, use the following Exec mode command to renew the license authorization manually:

license smart renew auth

Handling Out of Compliance

If there are not enough licenses in the virtual account for a given SKU, CSSM sends Out Of Compliance (OOC) message to the device, in response to authorization request. The system stops allowing additional sessions until the OOC state is cleared. OOC state is cleared when the devices receives authorized response to one of the subsequent authorization request.

Enter the following Exec mode command to verify the Smart Licensing configuration:

show configuration | grep license

The following Exec mode commands display information about Smart Licensing:

show license { all | smart-tags | statistics | status | summary | tech-support | udi | usage } [ | { grep grep_options | more } ]

Notes:

• all - Shows a superset of information that includes show status, show usage, show UDI, as well as the Smart Licensing agent version.

• summary - Shows an overview of Smart Licensing status.

• smart-tags - Shows the services that are currently supported and the corresponding Smart Entitlement Tag.

• statistics - Shows individual feature license status.

• status - Shows overall Smart Licensing status information.

• summary - Shows summary of Smart Licensing status.

• tech-support - Shows information useful for debugging issues with Smart Licensing.

• udi - Shows details for all Unique Device Identifiers (UDI).

• usage - Shows the usage information for all entitlements that are currently in use.

The following SNMP alarms (traps) are produced to track issues with Smart Licensing.

• starSmartLicenseServiceOOC / starSmartLicenseServiceOOCClear

• starSmartLicenseEvalMode / starSmartLicenseEvalModeClear

• starSmartLicenseEvalModeExpire / starSmartLicenseEvalModeExpireClear

• starSmartLicenseCSSMConntectionFail / starSmartLicenseCSSMConnectionFailClear

Note	For more information regarding these SNMP MIB alarms, see the SNMP MIB Reference.