Smart Licensing is a cloud-based, flexible software licensing model that enables you to activate and manage Cisco software licenses across their organization. Smart Licensing solution allows you to easily track the status of your license and software usage trends. Cisco Smart Licensing establishes a pool of licenses or entitlements that can be used across the entire organization in a flexible and automated manner. Smart Licensing helps simplify four core functions:

• Purchase—Creates a Smart Account (and optionally, your Virtual Account). Licenses are added to your Smart Account and are immediately available for use.

• Install—Register your product with your Smart Account using an account-based Registration Token. Thereafter, the entire process is automatic. Product Activation Keys (PAKs) and license files are no longer needed.

• Management—Make changes to license consumption by updating your configuration; any license change is automatically reflected in your Smart Account. You can share licenses in your Virtual Account through the license pooling option. License pools (logical grouping of licenses) can reflect your organization structure. Smart Licensing solution also offers Cisco Smart Software Manager, a centralized portal that enables you to manage all your Cisco software licenses from one centralized website.

• Visibility and Asset Management—Cisco Smart Software Manager (CSSM) portal offers an integrated view of the licenses you own and have deployed. You can use this data to make better purchase decisions, based on your consumption.

The Flexible Consumption Model (FCM) provides the capability and flexibility to purchase software capacity as needed. FCM delivers the following:

• Pay-as-you-grow—Enables you to lower initial costs and add more capacity over time.

• Simplify operations—FCM delivers the carrier-class IOS-XR software feature set with two software suites, Essentials and Advantage, that simplifies license management.

• Utilize capital efficiently—License pooling enables an efficient way to share licenses across the network.

The types of licenses in this model are:

• Essential Licenses are the base licenses that are required by every active port for its operation. An example of Essential License is ESS-100G-RTU-1.

• Advantage (earlier known as Advanced licenses) without essential licenses, are the licenses that are required on top of Essential Licenses for ports that use advanced features like L3VPN. An example of an advantage license is ADV-400G-RTU-1.

• Advantage with Essential combination licenses are the licenses that are packaged together as a combined entitlement. Example of an advantage license with essentials is ADN-100G-RTU-1.

• Tracking licenses, for example NCS-5501-TRK.

To enable Flexible Consumption model licensing on routers running Cisco IOS XR :

Router(config)# license smart flexible-consumption enable 
Router(config)# commit

<rpc xmlns="urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:netconf:base:1.0" message-id="101">
  <get-config>
    <source>
      <running/>
    </source>
    <filter>
      <licensing xmlns="http://cisco.com/ns/yang/Cisco-IOS-XR-smart-license-cfg">
        <flex-consumption/>
      </licensing>
    </filter>
  </get-config>
</rpc>

To verify the Flexible Consumption Model configuration:

Device# show running-config license smart flexible-consumption enable

The following tables provide information about FCM licenses for NCS 5500 and NCS 5700 Series routers:

1. Place Order and Create Smart Account—You must have a Smart Account to set up Smart Licensing.

   1. Go to https://software.cisco.com/.

   2. Under the Administration section, click Get a Smart Account or Request Access to an Existing Smart Account.

   3. Verify or enter your Cisco.com profile details to complete creating a Smart Account.

2. Activate and Use Software—Register your product. For more information, see the Registering your Router section. You can use either of the following options to communicate with the CSSM:

   • Smart Transport—The Smart Transport method is a transport method where a Smart Licensing (JSON) message is contained within a HTTPs message, and exchanged between a product instance and CSSM to communicate. The following Smart transport configuration options are available.

     • Smart Transport: In this method, a product instance uses a specific Smart transport licensing server URL. This must be configured exactly as shown in the workflow section.

     • Smart transport through an HTTPs proxy: In this method, a product instance uses a proxy server to communicate with the licensing server, and eventually, CSSM.

   • Smart Call Home—The Smart Call Home feature is automatically configured. Smart Call Home is used by Smart Licensing as a medium for communication with the CSSM. You can use this feature to page a network support engineer, email a Network Operations Center, or use Cisco Smart Call Home services to generate a case with the Technical Assistance Center. The Call Home feature can deliver alert messages containing information about diagnostics and environmental faults and events. For more information on Smart Call Home feature, see the Smart Call Home Deployment Guide.

   • Smart Licensing CSSM On-Prem—The Smart licensing on-premise option provides an on-premises collector that can be used to consolidate and manage Smart license usage, as well as facilitate communications back to the CSSM at Cisco.com.

3. Manage Licenses—You can manage and view reports about your overall license usage in the Smart Software Manager portal.

Cisco Smart Software Manager enables you to manage all of your Cisco Smart software licenses from one centralized website. With Cisco Smart Software Manager, you organize and view your licenses in groups called virtual accounts (collections of licenses and product instances). The Cisco Smart Software Manager allows you to:

• Create, manage, or view virtual accounts

• Create and manage Product Instance Registration Tokens

• Transfer licenses between virtual accounts or view licenses

• Transfer, remove, or view product instances

• Run reports against your virtual accounts

• Modify your email notification settings

• View overall account information

To access the Cisco Smart Software Manager:

• Go to https://software.cisco.com.

• Under the License section, click Smart Software Licensing.

YANG is a data modeling language that helps to create configurations, retrieve operational data and execute actions. The router acts on the data definition when these operations are requested using NETCONF RPCs. The data model handles the following types of requirements on the routers for smart licensing functionality:

Product registration securely associates a device with the Smart Account and the Virtual Account of your choice. It also establishes trust between the end product and the CSSM. Tokens are used to register a product with the appropriate Virtual Account on CSSM Cloud (on Cisco.com) or CSSM On-Premise.

Note	When the router is in an unregistered state, the licenses are in EVAL (evaluation) mode. Evaluation period will last for 90 days.

A Registration Token:

• Can be either used once or reused multiple times. You can set a limit to the number of times a token can be reused when you create the token.

• Can be created and revoked at any time.

• Expires after a period of time (default is 30 days; minimum is one day; maximum is 365 days)

A Registration Token is not:

• Product specific: The same Registration Token can be used on different product types.

• A license, key, or PAK.

• Stored on the Cisco device and they are not persistent.

• Required after the product is registered. Token expiration has no effect on previously registered products; it simply means that that token can no longer be used to register a new product.

SLR is reservation of specific licenses from the smart account as per the usage on the router.Whereas, PLR is for selected customers who don't want tracking of license usage. This license allows unlimited usage without taking into consideration of license usage on the router.

Specific License Reservation (SLR) allows customers in highly secure networks to utilize smart licenses without communicating the license information to the Cisco Smart Software manager (CSSM).Routers that are registered with smart licenses share router information at regular intervals with Cisco Smart Software Manager (CSSM). Routers that are deployed in a highly secure network must not share the router information externally. Cisco offers license reservation as an on-request configuration for these routers.

Specific License Reservation is a solution designed for classified environments that don’t allow electronic communication in or out of the environment. In such environments, routers are unable to communicate with the Cisco Smart Software Manager (CSSM) directly or through CSSM OnPrem. These deployments can use SLR that allows using all entitlements on the router without communicating to Cisco.

To enable and use the SLR feature, generate a reservation request code from the router. Use this code in the CSSM portal to reserve an available SLR license and generate an authorization code. When you enter this authorization code in the router CLI, the license reservation becomes effective.

Before configuring Specific License Reservation, connect with your account representative and complete the following tasks:

• Create a Smart Account.

• Enable your Smart Account for SLR.

• Get access to SLR PIDs in Cisco Commerce Workspace (CCW).

• Order SLR licenses in CCW and make sure they are available in your Smart Account on CSSM.

Enable Specific License Reservation feature of licensing using the license smart reservation command in the global configuration mode.

The following sections provide various SLR examples.