Charon Emulator products require a product license to run. Stromasys offers several different licensing methods from which the one best suited to the customer requirements must be selected. This page provides an overview of the different methods and their applicability to different emulator environments.

The three basic licensing technologies that will be described in the following sections are:

• Sentinel HASP licensing, a third-party solution offering local and network-based hardware and software licenses - now owned by Thales.

• VE (Virtual Environment) licensing developed and owned by Stromasys offering local and network-based software licenses.

• Automatic licensing for cloud instances developed and owned by Stromasys (currently for Charon-SSP only) offering cloud-specific metered licensing.

Additional information:

• Sentinel HASP Licensing Documentation: detailed information about HASP licensing and managing the licensing option on different emulator products.

• Virtual Environment (VE) License Server Documentation: detailed information about installing, configuring, and managing a VE license server, and about managing the licensing option on different emulators.

• Charon-AXP,  Charon-VAX, Charon-PAR, and Charon-SSP user's guides: detailed information about the product installation, in particular license drivers and utilities included in the product distribution. Detailed information about the configuration file content of each product.

Contents

Product Support Overview and General Recommendations

The different licensing types are described in more detail below. This section shows which options are supported by the individual products, and for which environments the options are best suited.

Licensing Options Characteristics

Common Characteristics of HASP and VE Licenses

Both, Sentinel HASP and VE licenses, have some common characteristics despite the differences in the technical implementation:

• Several products can be licensed on one license.

• Several emulator instances can be licensed on one license.

• A license can be limited by a specified expiration date.

• A license can be limited by a specified number of runtime hours (mostly used as backup licenses).

• The license used by the emulator can be on the Charon emulator host itself or served over the network. Since software licenses are very sensitive to any hardware change or backup restoration, dedicated stable license server systems are recommended in production environments using software licenses.

Sentinel HASP Licenses (Thales) - Specific Characteristics

Sentinel HASP Overview

Sentinel HASP licenses are the "traditional" licensing method for Charon emulator products. Their main characteristics are:

• Software and hardware (dongle) licenses.

• Based on third-party vendor solution.

• Require special third-party license driver software which is distributed with the Charon emulator products.

• Installed on Charon host or separate license server.

• Problematic in cloud environments and somewhat difficult to use in VMware environments.

• Hardware dongles are a flexible and host-hardware independent solution for on-premises installations (as long as there is a free USB port).

• The customer is billed by Stromasys depending on the number and type of the emulated systems allowed by the installed license(s). The license driver software itself is free of charge.

Please refer to the Charon License Handbook (Licensing Documentation) for details about these licenses.

USB Hardware Dongles