User guide

FLEXnet Licensing End User Guide 39
Chapter 4Selecting License Server Machines 4
This chapter helps you decide which machines to use as license server machines.
Resources Used by the Server
This section discusses the resources used by the license server system. When you select a server
machine, you may need to take into account the system limits on these resources. For small
numbers of licenses (under about 100), most of these system limits are not a problem on any
workstation.
Sockets
When using TCP/IP ports, each FLEXenabled application connected to a license server system
uses one or more sockets. The number of sockets any one FLEXenabled application requires is
dependant on FLEXnet Licensing implementation details; consult your vendor for this
information. The number of sockets available to the license server system is defined by the per-
process system limit for file descriptors. The total number of sockets used by the license server
system is slightly larger than the total number needed by the FLEXenabled applications which
are served by it.
If the number of sockets required by the license server system on a single machine becomes
excessive, then it’s probably good to split the license file into more than one file, onto different
servers, to lighten the networking traffic (which requires the vendor to agree to issue new
licenses). FLEXenabled applications then check out licenses from multiple servers using a
license-file list via the
LM_LICENSE_FILE environment variable.
CPU Time
For small numbers of clients, the license server systems use very little CPU time. The servers
might have only a few seconds of CPU time after many days.
For a large number of clients (who are each exchanging heartbeat messages with the server), or
for high checkout/checkin activity levels (hundreds per second), the amount of CPU time
consumed by the server may start to become significant, although, even here, CPU usage is
normally not high. In this case, you may need to ensure that the server machine you select has
enough CPU cycles to spare.