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Another change to Vault 2017 you may have already noticed is licensing. Historically Vault has been licensed differently to other Autodesk products – not only was it only available as a network license / concurrent usage model but the client PC using Vault did not retrieve the license, the server the client connected to would pull the license on the client’s behalf.
Not sure what that means? Well put simply we would log into a Vault server, and the Vault server would contact the license server to see if there was a license, and if a license were available, the client would be allowed access.
This method made sense as it provided a single point of contact for all licenses, but there were some limitations, until recently administrators could not easily see which clients were using Vault licenses, it was harder to plan global implementations where licensing was managed in different locations, difficult to manage partner license access and as company software usage and purchasing has changed Autodesk realized it needed a different approach to all desktop product licensing including Vault.
So this year Vault clients now connect directly to the license server – the change for average users? Not much. During roll-out the administrators will need to define the license type and license server for the client machine (stored in licpath.lic file on the client machine), but once available the user simply logs into Vault and the client requests a license from the license server – if one is available you are in.
Vault still supports previous versions of the Vault client, still supports token-flex, and is being extended to support subscription only licensing (time bound concurrent network licenses) so you can align with your other CAD product options. To help understand license behavior, users can now see Vault license status directly from Vault Explorer (see top right corner of the window), where we display license behavior and time remaining if using a time bound license.
The administrator is able to see who is using Vault licenses, report on access, create groups and reserve licenses. There are also a few subtle differences here, most notably that a single machine will now only consume 1 license regardless of how many sessions with different users are started. We have simplified access to one machine = one Vault license.
Now Vault is capable of client side licensing we are looking in the future to better align purchasing options and behavior with the CAD applications enabling customers to buy and use Vault any way they please.
-Allan
