Overview

StarOS 21.3 and higher releases support Smart Licensing. Smart Licensing is a cloud-based approach to licensing that simplifies the purchase, deployment, and management of Cisco software assets. Entitlements are purchased through your Cisco account via Cisco Commerce Workspace (CCW) and immediately deposited into your Virtual Account for usage. This eliminates the need to install license files on every device. Products that are smart enabled communicate directly to Cisco to report consumption. A single location is available to customers to manage Cisco software licenses—the Cisco Smart Software Manager (CSSM). License ownership and consumption are readily available to help make better purchase decision based on consumption or business need.

See https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/buy/smart-accounts/software-licensing.html for more information about Cisco Smart Licensing.

Comparison Between Legacy Licensing and Smart Licensing

Cisco employs two types of license models - Legacy Licensing and Smart Software Licensing. Legacy Licensing consists of software activation by installing Product Activation Keys (PAK) on to the Cisco product. A Product Activation Key is a purchasable item, ordered in the same manner as other Cisco equipment and used to obtain license files for feature set on Cisco Products. Smart Software Licensing is a cloud based licensing of the end-to-end platform through the use of a few tools that authorize and deliver license reporting. Smart Software Licensing functionality incorporated into StarOS complete the product registration, authorization resulting in reporting services available to the end customer.

Smart Licensing in StarOS

The Cisco Smart Software Manager (CSSM) is the server which keeps track of license usage and responsible for authorizing the client which exists in StarOS products. The client part of Smart Licensing has three major components which are integrated into StarOS products:

• Smart Agent: registers the StarOS product to obtain necessary authorization for entitlement usage.

• Call-Home: interacts with the Cisco cloud service and is also used to report necessary events.

• Trust Pool: retrieves and maintains the certificates.

Evalutation Period

A 90 day evalutation period is granted for all licenses in use. During this period feature licenses can be used without limitation, and up to one counting license each can be used. The evaluation period ends when the system registers successfully with the CSSM or Cisco.com. Licensed functionality is blocked when this 90 day period expires.

Smart Licensing in Release 21.6

In Release 21.6 and higher, Smart Licensing supports on/off feature licenses. In previous releases Smart Licensing only supported counting licenses.

StarOS performs license enforcement for on/off feature licenses. Each on/off feature license is tied to service licenses, which potentially use those on/off features. When an Out of Compliance (OOC) is detected for an on/off license, new calls for the corresponding services will be dropped, subject to the following conditions:

• Each on/off feature license is given a 90 day grace (evaluation) period. During this period, the system generates SNMP traps to inform of the unavailability of valid licenses. To resolve the OOC, corrective action is needed such as purchasing and registering licenses for this feature, or disabling the feature.

• If the feature is still OOC after the 90 day grace period, StarOS enforces the OOC state based on a predefined policy for each license. If enforcement is required, new calls for the services corresponding to the on/off licenses are dropped.

Two new commands have been introduced to display details about the enforcement of Smart Licenses in use:

show license enforcement policy 
show license enforcement status [ allowed | blocked ] [ feature | service ] 

Smart Licensing in Release 21.3

When Smart Licensing is enabled in Release 21.3, it operates in mixed mode where both Legecy and Smart Licensing is used.

• Legacy (PAK-based) licenses continue to be used for On/Off features.

• Smart licensing is used for counting each service. In Release 21.3 only the counting licenses listed below in "Entitlement Tags" are controlled by Smart Licensing. All other counting licenses use Legacy (PAK-based) licenses.

Before you begin, ensure you have:

• Created a Smart Licensing account on https://software.cisco.com.

• Registered your products on https://software.cisco.com using the Product Instance Registration tokens created as part of Smart Account/Virtual Account.

• Enabled a communication path between the StarOS system to the CSSM server or Cisco.com.

Enable Smart Licensing

By default, Smart Licensing is disabled in StarOS. To enable Smart Licensing, enter the following Config mode commands:

config
   license smart enable
   end
 

Enter the following command to verify the configuration:

show configuration | grep license 

Register the Device with Cisco

Using the id Product Instance Registration token provided when you registered the products on https://software.cisco.com, register the system using the following Exec mode command:

license smart register idtoken token
 

The system now automatically report entitlement usage count to the CSSM server and receive a compliance status. This also removes the system from "Evaluation Mode".

To show the compliance status, enter any of the following Exec mode commands:

show license status
show license summary
show license statistics
 

The registration for the system is renewed automatically every 180 days. If needed, use the following Exec mode command to renew the registration information manually:

license smart renew id
 

The license authorization for the system is renewed automatically every 30 days. If needed, use the following Exec mode command to renew the license authorization manually:

license smart renew auth
 

To unregister a device, enter the following Exec mode command:

license smart deregister 

Handling Out of Compliance

If there are not enough licenses in the virtual account for a given SKU, CSSM sends an Out Of Compliance (OOC) message to the device. The system stops allowing additional sessions until the OOC state is cleared. The OOC state is cleared when the device receives an authorized response.

Enter the following Exec mode command to verify the Smart Licensing configuration:

show configuration | grep license 

The following Exec mode commands display information about Smart Licensing:

show license { all | enforcement | eval-period | smart-tags | statistics | status | summary | tech-support | udi | usage } [ | { grep grep_options | more } ] 

Notes:

• all - Shows a superset of information that includes show status, show usage, show UDI, as well as the Smart Licensing agent version.

• enforcement { policy | status [ allowed | blocked ] [ feature | service ] } - Shows the enforcement policy applied or current enforcement status of Smart Licenses. Status information can be filtered to show only the licenses which are currently allowed or blocked, or by type (feature license or service license).

• eval-period - Shows information about the evaluation period. Licenses are granted a 90 day evaluation period until they are registered.

• smart-tags [ feature | service ] - Shows the features and services that are currently supported and the corresponding Smart Entitlement Tag.

• statistics - Shows individual feature license status.

• status - Shows overall Smart Licensing status information.

• summary - Shows summary of Smart Licensing status.

• tech-support - Shows information useful for debugging issues with Smart Licensing.

• udi - Shows details for all Unique Device Identifiers (UDI).

• usage - Shows the usage information for all entitlements that are currently in use.

The following SNMP alarms (traps) are produced to track issues with Smart Licensing.

• 1349: starSmartLicenseServiceOOC / starSmartLicenseServiceOOCClear

• 1350: starSmartLicenseEvalMode / starSmartLicenseEvalModeClear

• 1351: starSmartLicenseEvalModeExpire / starSmartLicenseEvalModeExpireClear

• 1352: starSmartLicenseCSSMConntectionFail / starSmartLicenseCSSMConnectionFailClear

• 1353: starSmartLicenseServiceEvalExpiry / starSmartLicenseServiceEvalExpiryClear

Note	For more information regarding these SNMP MIB alarms, see the SNMP MIB Reference.