Managing licenses

You can use the administrative web interface to manage and monitor client access licenses (CALs).

Rational solution for Collaborative Lifecycle Management (CLM) products align function to specific roles. These roles grant a user the ability to perform actions that are related to the function. Each user is assigned a specific, license-based role.

With a role-based licensing scheme, when you purchase a client access license for a particular role, you have read and write access to some or all of the capabilities of the Change and Configuration Management (CCM), Quality Management (QM), and Requirements Management (RM) applications.

Client access licenses

There are several types of client access licenses:
  • Authorized licenses are permanent licenses that are assigned to a single user.
  • Floating licenses are managed as a pool that can be shared by multiple users. These users can individually check out a license when they access a product, provided a license is available from the pool. Licenses are managed by the Jazz floating license server.
  • Token licenses are another type of floating CAL. Each role-based license has a token cost. When a user assumes a particular role, the token cost that is associated with the role is checked out of the token pool. Token CALs are managed through the Rational Common Licensing token service.
Important: Assign authorized licenses to user IDs that use the system heavily, such as a system ID that is used by one or more build engines to access CLM resources. Do not assign floating or token licenses to such user IDs. Performing license checks in certain topologies can affect both system and build performance.

For more information about client access licenses, see Client access license management overview.

License servers

The floating license server is a service of Jazz™ Team Server that manages authorized and floating licenses. You can have a Jazz Team Server application act as a dedicated floating CAL server; you can also use an existing Jazz Team Server application as a floating license server. For more information, see Floating client access license management overview.

Note: Jazz Team Server calls floating license service to obtain diagnostic information. If the version of the floating license server is older than Jazz Team Server, then it cannot understand the request and returns an error code as a failed diagnostic. In this situation you can ignore the failed diagnostic and disable it.

The token license server is a separate, external application that is called the Rational License Key Server. Multiple products use the Rational License Key Server, not just Jazz based products, and you can use the token pools across these products.

The Rational® Common Licensing token service, which is an extension of the Jazz Team Server, allows token requests to be forwarded by the Jazz license server to an external Rational License Key Server. You install license tokens on the Rational License Key Server, and a Jazz Team Server application requests and distributes these tokens as clients request them. As with floating CALs, you can use an existing Jazz Team Server application, or you can set up a dedicated Jazz Team Server application to communicate with the Rational License Key Server application.

For performance reasons, there must be a reliable, high-speed network connection between the Jazz license server and the externally managed Rational License Key Server application. If there is slow network throughput or the Jazz license server cannot connect to the Rational License Key Server, users cannot be validated and therefore cannot access CLM applications. A best practice is to have the Jazz license server and the Rational License Key Server in the same geographical area, where network speed and throughput are the same.

For more information about the Rational Common Licensing token service, see Setting up the Rational Common Licensing token service keys and Client access license management overview.

For deployment information about licensing, see the Jazz licensing explained section of the Jazz.net Deployment wiki. Content on Jazz.net is governed by the Jazz.net Terms of Use and is provided as-is without warranties of any kind.


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