User guide

Appendix B - License File Format

License File Syntax

FLEXnet Licensing End User Guide 109

majority. License servers that are not part of the majority, including single license servers that

cannot communicate with any other of its redundant license servers, refuse to serve licenses.

License servers that are not part of the majority continue to run, but only so that they can

continue their attempt to join the majority or form a majority if no majority yet exists.

If a license server system ever detects that it is no longer in communication with the majority,

it refuses to serve licenses until it can. If the members of the majority determine that they have

lost communication with enough other license servers that they have lost the majority, they

refuse to serve licenses.

If FLEXnet Licensing allowed a set of counted licenses to be bound to only two redundant

license server systems, then, by the rules above, only a group that contains greater than one half

of the total number of redundant license servers would allow itself to serve licenses. For a group

of only two, this would mean both license servers would have to remain in constant

communication and neither could fail. That is, the only number greater than one half of two is

two, which is not a fail-over solution.

Because of the requirement for a majority, the obvious number of redundant license server

systems to use is an odd number. Using an even number of license servers would require an

extra license server to be part of the majority without adding value. For simplicity, FLEXnet

Licensing only supports three redundant license servers because three is the smallest odd

number greater than one.