Activating your product

If you are installing the software for the first time or want to extend a license to continue using the product, including chargeable components, you have options on how to activate licensing for your product or chargeable components.

Licenses for this product are activated in two ways:

Importing a license activation kit
Activating Rational® Common Licensing to obtain access to floating license keys

Note: If you are using a trial license, it will expire after a preset amount of time after you install the product. To use the product after the trial license expires, you must activate a permanent or a floating license for your product.

Important: If you have a trial version of Rational Application Developer that you installed using the web-based installation process from DeveloperWorks, then the version of WebSphere® Application Server, version 8.0 included in that installation is a trial copy.

To convert both Rational Application Developer and WebSphere Application Server, version 8.x from trial versions to licensed versions:

Purchase and install a license for Rational Application Developer (either an Activation Kit or by enabling floating license enforcement).
Download a full image of WebSphere Application Server, version 8.x from the IBM® Passport Advantage® website.
Upgrade the installed trial version of WebSphere Application Server, version 8.x to the full version.

Activation kits

A license activation kit contains the permanent license key for you product or a chargeable component. You purchase the activation kit, download the activation kit compressed file to your computer, and then use IBM Installation Manager to import the activation kit (a .jar file) to activate the license for your product or each chargeable component.

Now IBM has changed how it delivers Authorized User (AU) license Activation Kits (AKs) for desktop-based Rational products obtained via Passport Advantage. For such products the Activation Kits will continue to be available from the Rational License Key Center but will also be packaged with the product installable images. For more information, see http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg27041656.

Floating license enforcement

Optionally, you can obtain floating license keys, install IBM Rational License Key Server, and enable floating license enforcement for your product.

For instructions on enabling a license for your product, see the topics in the section Managing clients for Rational Common Licensing in the Rational Common Licensing product documentation at Rational Common Licensing overview. The Rational Common Licensing product documentation has detailed information about licenses for IBM Rational products. Topics include:

Important: If you use floating licenses, including token licenses, for your product and chargeable components, you must upgrade your license key server to Rational License Key Server, Version 8.1.2, before installing the product. Rational License Key Server, Version 8.1.2 can be used with earlier versions of the product. For information about how to upgrade from v7.1.x or an earlier Rational License Key Server to v8.1.2, see Upgrading and migrating.

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