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Question

What are the best practices for CHARON licensing in complex environments (multiple instances, VMware, Hyper-V)?

Recommendations

1. Single point of failure.
   Latest CHARON versions support specifying 2 license IDs in its config file (CHARON versions required: CHARON-AXP and CHARON-VAX V4.6 and up). You can have many licenses available to CHARON, but it will look for licenses specified in its config in a specific order.
    We highly recommend to use this option.
   
   
   
2. Local dongles on VMware can work pretty well. There is an option (USB Pass-through) which you can set for a USB device to follow a VM appliance around the farm. Even if a VM is vMotioned to another ESXi host, the farm still provides access. Please refer to VMware documentation:Configuring USB Passthrough Devices for vMotion
   Disadvantage: if an original ESXi host goes down, so does the license.
   
   
3. Local dongles can be served to CHARON VMs with some USB over TCP solutions, like AnywhereUSB. Its stability totally depends on the stability of a third party solution.
   Advantage: licensing over network
   Disadvantage: dependency on the network
   
   
4. CHARON Software licenses are bound to VM machine ID and set of other IDs which are not changed if the VM is vMotioned (though they would if the VM is cloned). CHARON Software licenses can also be used in non VM environments. We recommend to use SL only if your CHARON landscape is static. If you create/recreate/change configs for CHARON VMs, this will not fit.
   Advantage: no dependency on USB
   Disadvantage: dependency on VM configuration
   
   
5. CHARON Network license. This is new. There could be a "license server" (a Windows or a Linux box with a lightweight application) in the network, equipped with a special dongle or a software license which serves other CHARON VMs over the network. This comes for an additional cost (USD or EUR 1K).
   Advantage: Starting from CHARON-VAX and -AXP version 4.7, network license counts number of CHARON instances, not number of hosting servers and instances per server. For example, a Network license with 6 CHARON instances allows to run 3 instances on a first hosting server, 2 instances on a second hosting server, and one instance in a third hosting server. In the previous versions of CHARON Network license set number of hosting systems and CHARON instances per host system.
   Disadvantage: if this server or network goes down, so do all the CHARON instances.

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