Pooled licensing simplifies the challenge of managing the license lifecycle with a cost-effective and flexible approach to enabling load balancing capacity where and when needed. Pooled licensing provides the platform to scale application delivery on-demand.

LoadMaster 360 acts as the licensing authority for pooled licensing and can issue individual LoadMaster licenses. Issued licenses deplete the pool but can be recovered and added back into the pool at any time for re-issue. This provides flexibility to issue licenses on-demand for a range of use cases ranging from short-term projects such as testing through to long-term licenses for customers or departments in the organization.

If you have a pooled license, you are allocated a specific amount of LoadMaster bandwidth and you can add or delete LoadMasters while staying within this limit. Each LoadMaster license has a defined bandwidth.

To access the Pooled license page in LoadMaster 360, click Infrastructure > License Repository and click the Pooled tab.
Note: The Pooled tab only appears if the tenant Owner Progress ID is enabled for consumption-based billing.

The Last refreshed date and time is displayed in the top-right of the License Repository screen. You can click Sync licenses to manually pull any license updates on demand.

Current allocation vs Maximum capacity of license pool

This section provides the summary of currently allocated licenses, available capacity, and the maximum capacity of the entire pool. The cylindrical chart displays the storage capacity based on the total usage per license type. Hover over the cylindrical chart to get details about the types of licenses and the number of active licenses of a particular type assigned to the LoadMasters.

The cylinder graph provides a graphical representation of the current license allocation against the maximum capacity of the pool. The different colored sections in the cylinder represent the different LoadMaster license types and their allocation. The vertical widths of the colored sections represent the amount of bandwidth used, for example, a VLM-10G license uses double the capacity of a VLM-5000. There is a minimum height set on the cylinder sections to ensure the sections relating to licenses with smaller bandwidth are visible on the graph.

The Current allocation number next to the chart provides the total bandwidth currently allocated (the total value of each of the colored sections in the chart). The Maximum capacity shows the total bandwidth capacity for the pool and this is represented by the dotted line on the cylinder chart. The Available capacity is the Maximum capacity minus the Current allocation (the gray/empty space in the cylinder chart).

Maximum allocation

On the License Repository page, there is a graph that displays the report for license usage per month. You can hover over a bar for a particular month to see the details of the date that had the highest capacity usage for the month. When you click a bar for a particular month, it displays the license usage data for each day of the month. Hover over a bar for a particular day to see the exact license usage data for that day. When the percentage of capacity usage exceeds 80% of capacity, the bar color changes to orange and if the capacity usage exceeds 100% of capacity, the bar color changes to red.

License overview

The License overview section provides a list of all pooled LoadMaster licenses associated with the Owner Progress ID in LoadMaster 360 (to check the Owner Progress ID refer to the Users page). Licenses that do not have a Device Name or IP Address listed are not under management in LoadMaster 360. You can filter the results based on the license Status:
  • Active: Currently active LoadMaster licenses.
  • Grace Period: LoadMaster licenses that have entered the grace period. For more details, refer to the following topic: .
  • Expired: LoadMasters that have expired licenses.
  • Killed: LoadMaster licenses that were once active but have since been recovered (unlicensed) to return capacity to the pool.

There is a search box that allows you to filter the list by typing a search term. You can return to the default view by clicking the Reset link.

Click the Export to CSV option to download a CSV file containing all of the pooled license details. All data is included in the CSV file (including pooled licenses shown on different pages and columns that you have unchecked/hidden in the User Interface (UI)). The Bandwidth column contains a numerical value of the number of megabytes per second (Mb/s) of bandwidth for each license. The CSV files are named in the format Pool_usage_YEARMONTHDAY.

You can select which columns to display in the table in LoadMaster 360 by ticking/unticking check boxes in the Columns drop-down list.

The table has the following columns:
  • Device Name
  • IP Address
  • Serial no.
  • License Name
  • Status
  • Bandwidth
  • SSL TPS (SSL Transactions Per Second)
  • Grace Period
  • Activation Date (of the LoadMaster license)
  • Recovery Date (the date the license was recovered/unlicensed and returned to the pool)

By default, the table is sorted by Device Name. By default, 10 licenses are shown on the page. You can increase the amount of licenses shown on the page using the drop-down in the bottom-left of the screen. You can move to a different page using the options in the bottom-right of the screen.

You can click an arrow next to a license in the License overview table to view historical license data. This displays any updates or changes to the LoadMaster license, for example, if the license was killed previously. The arrow (to view historical license data) only appears if you have an active license. Historical data is not maintained for killed licenses. If the active license only contains one record, clicking the arrow returns an error message that says "No historical data available".

How to return LoadMaster license bandwidth to the pool

If you have a pooled license, you are allocated a specific amount of LoadMaster bandwidth. You can license or deactivate LoadMasters while staying within this limit. Each LoadMaster license has a defined bandwidth. The License Repository screen in LoadMaster 360 (that you can access from the Infrastructure tab) displays how much of your license pool you are using out of your current limit.

To return a license to the license pool, follow these steps:
  1. In LoadMaster 360, go to Infrastructure > License Repository .
  2. Select a license in the License overview section.
  3. Click Kill License.
    Note: You can only kill a LoadMaster license through LoadMaster 360 if the LoadMaster was licensed using LoadMaster 360.
  4. Type KILL and click Kill License to confirm.

When you kill a LoadMaster license through LoadMaster 360:

  • The Status of the license in the License overview section changes to Killed.
  • The Device Name and IP Address values are removed from the killed row in the Licenses overview table.
  • The LoadMaster is removed from the device inventory in LoadMaster 360.
  • An email is sent to the relevant Progress ID.
  • Virtual Services that were on the killed LoadMaster are removed from their mapped applications in LoadMaster 360.

If LoadMaster 360 can communicate with the LoadMaster, the LoadMaster gets disabled and the licensed capacity is returned to the pool. You will need to delete this LoadMaster from your environment. The Status of the license in the License overview section changes to Killed.

If the license validity period is over, the Status of the license in the License overview section changes to Expired.

If there are connectivity issues between the Connector and LoadMaster 360 for 24 hours the LoadMasters connected to that Connector will move into a 30-day grace period and the LoadMaster Status will be Grace Period. If the connectivity is restored within this 30 days everything will continue to work as normal and the LoadMaster exits the grace period. If there is no connectivity for 30 days and the grace period expires, the LoadMaster ceases to operate:
  • The LoadMaster becomes unlicensed
  • You cannot access the UI
  • All traffic is stopped
If you have a Communications channel configured in LoadMaster 360, an email notification will be sent if:
  • A Connector goes down
  • A Connector that was down, comes back online

If the Connector Virtual Machine goes down and cannot be brought back up, you must deploy a new Connector. Because the LoadMaster licensing check is done using the Connector, you must kill your existing LoadMaster licenses that were tied to the original Connector (through LoadMaster 360) and then re-license the LoadMasters in LoadMaster 360. If this is not done, the LoadMaster enters a 30 day grace period and the license will be revoked when the grace period expires.

If you have licensed a LoadMaster through LoadMaster 360 using pooled licensing, you cannot remove the LoadMaster from the LoadMaster 360 device inventory before you kill the license.

If the IP address of a Connector changes you must access the LoadMaster UI for any LoadMasters in the pool that are linked to that Connector and update the Host to the new Connector IP address in System Configuration > System Administration > License Management. You may also need to update the Syslog host in System Configuration > Logging Options > Syslog Options to the new Connector IP address.