Distributed network license setup

Quick tip

Ever wanted to combine the licenses of Autodesk products of two license servers without merging the license files into one license file? But you want users to grab a license when the maximum license count is reached on one of the two license servers but the maximum of the total licenses of the two license servers is not yet reached?

Here’s how you can achieve this easily.

As a system admin create a system environment variable on each client PC with the name ADSKFLEX_LICENSE_FILE and assign the 2 or even more license server host names to it’s value like this: @server_host_name1;@server_host_name2

Now when the licenses from server1 reach it’s maximum, the licenses from server2 will be available.
In other words: when no licenses from server1 are left, the client goes to the second server in line to grab a license there, if any available. And so on if you have more server host names assigned with the adskflex_license_file environment variable.

In Flexlm network license terms this is called “Distributed” license setup.
Other license setups can be Single or Redundant.

In practice: For separate setup of those license servers each residing on a different graphical location for example, you could point clients at location A to server1 and server2 as a backup. Clients residing at location B point to server2 and server1 as a backup. This way all the clients get their allocated licenses first before they go outside to their 2nd backup server.

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