Licensing FlowTracer by Seat

FlowTracer can be licensed by "seat". Each seat can be considered a license to implement flows with up to a certain number of jobs and up to a certain number of slots for parallel execution. Multiple seats are checked out automatically to cover the requirements of each flow.

The seats come in 3 sizes, namely L, XL, and GXL, each corresponding to a RLM feature called seat_ft_l, seat_ft_xl, and seat_ft_gxl.

Generalized Seats

Each seat is can be defined by two numbers (J,S), where J represents the number of "jobs" allowed in a flow, and S is the number of parallel slots that can be used for execution of the job. A RLM feature representing a generic seat has the form 
seat_ft_J_S
For example: 
seat_ft_1000_5
seat_ft_40000_100
seat_ft_100000_300
To activate seat licensing, you have to set the parameter seatlic to the name of the feature you want to use. This parameter can take the following values:
  • "-" to mean "no change"
  • "" to mean "disable"
  • <name_of_seat_license> to select a specific type of seat license
% echo "SELECT SEAT LICENSE FROM THE COMMAND LINE"
> source /<install_path>/<version>/<platform>/common/etc/vovrc.csh
% vovsh -x "vtk_server_config seatlic seat_ft_l"
or
## This is in policy.tcl
set config(seatlic) "seat_ft_l";# Enable seat licensing with feature seat_ft_l

# set config(seatlic) "-" ;# No change. 
# set config(seatlic) ""  ;# Disable seat licensing
To disable seat licensing, you need to set the parameter seatlic to the empty string, as in:
% echo "DISABLE SEAT LICENSING FROM THE COMMAND LINE"
> source /<install_path>/<version>/<platform>/common/etc/vovrc.csh
% vovsh -x 'vtk_server_config seatlic ""'
## This is in policy.tcl
set config(seatlic) ""
Remember that after changing the policy.tcl file, you need to ask for: 
% vovproject sanity

Each FlowTracer server will use one or more seats, but all seats have to be of the same type. For example, if you are using the seat feature "seat_ft_1000_5" and your flow has 8345 jobs, you will need 9 seats of type "seat_ft_1000_5", which will also give you access to 45 parallel slots.

Under normal circumstances, it is expected that the seat licenses given to a customer are sized in such way as to allow most FlowTracer servers to use exactly 1 seat, and occasionally 2 seats. In general, however, there is no limit in the number of seats that a given FlowTracer server can use to accommodate the size of the flow, expressed by the total number of jobs in the flow.

The license seat requirement is checked about once an hour. Excessive seats are released or additional seats are checked out. To force an immediate check of the license seats, run vovproject sanity.

If the required number of seats cannot be obtained, the vovserver goes into "License Violation", which means that no additional jobs can be dispatched to the taskers. Everything else still works.