IBM Support

Difference between Authorized User License and Floating Licenses

Question & Answer


Question

What are the differences between an Authorized User License and a Floating License?

Cause

The differences are not documented in the manual.

Answer

Floating licenses:

  • Imported in a centralized license server system. The clients point to this server machine to fetch licenses. Once the end user closes the application, the license goes back to the pool for reuse.
  • These keys are tied to the host ID (Ethernet/MAC address (Unix, Windows), Volume serial number (Windows), of the machine where is imported. In order to check out a license to use the product, client machines must point to the License Server. The number of licenses registered and installed on the license server limits the number of concurrent users.


Authorized User licenses:
  • Server based or client based
  • Server based license keys are referred to as USER_BASED licenses (or NamedUser), and client based licenses are referred to as Node lock or activation kits.
  • Server based license keys can be assigned to a user (by making use of options file), while node lock licenses are tied to a specific machine and the user working on it.
  • Activation kits are version dependent licenses and is independent of the machine it gets imported on.

[{"Product":{"code":"SSTMW6","label":"Rational License Key Server"},"Business Unit":{"code":"BU053","label":"Cloud & Data Platform"},"Component":"General Information","Platform":[{"code":"PF002","label":"AIX"},{"code":"PF010","label":"HP-UX"},{"code":"PF016","label":"Linux"},{"code":"PF027","label":"Solaris"},{"code":"PF033","label":"Windows"}],"Version":"Version Independent","Edition":"","Line of Business":{"code":"","label":""}}]

Document Information

Modified date:
16 June 2018

UID

swg21216365