Borrow and Use Rockwell Activations

[whussain6]

Hi Guys,

Anybody have idea how to borrow Rockwell activations from one virtual machine to another. Both machines have no physical/network connection with each other.

Is there anyway that the licence machine create a file when you borrow and that file can be used on other machine to activate the licence temporarily.


Thanks

 

[Helliana]

It is possible if you have concurrent licenses for your software. It is not possible if you have node-locked.

You have to have FactoryTalk Activation Manager acting as a server either on the host machine or one another virtual machine that are accessible via a network. You then put the IP address of the server in the Activation Manager of the client machine. The licenses will then be checked out on a first come, first serve basis.

 

[Ken Roach]

I did this differently, but with a similar desired result.

My host computer has FactoryTalk Activation Manager and has all the activations on it. I use the hard drive Volume ID as the unique identifier when creating the activations. I'm not totally sure if these count as "concurrent activations" because I have an OEM Toolkit, but I think they do.

The VMWare VM's each have a "host only" network adapter and I configure FactoryTalk Activation Manager on those VMs to point to the host computer's "host-only" IP address.

It's a relatively slow method; it can take a minute or more for the software to start up because FTA is busy checking the whole network instead of heading straight to the host-only network, but its tolerable.

But I have a half-dozen VMs, each with different versions of RA software going back about six years, and they call can activate off the host computer.

I have recently migrated away from this method to an actual server-based (on our enterprise LAN) method, which has a different set of challenges but also works.