One of the great new features introduced in recent builds of SWS is the ability to reclaim client licenses, not to be confused with application licenses. When the streaming agent is installed on a workstation it consumes a license from the pool of available (procured) licenses installed on the backend. Sometimes a need arises to reclaim a license. This could be due to adding clients that exceed licenses available, or maybe a workstation has been corrupted to the point of unusable, or any number of reasons that could come up.
In the past this required uninstalling the agent from the client which released the license. This approach of course has a number of issues. The most obvious is that it's much too involved a process to do something simple such as release a license. What if the workstation was no longer operational? What if you need to do this with multiple machines?
Today this can be done directly from the SWS console.
All you need to do is set the number of days a workstation has been inactive, and click Search. Leaving 0 (zero) will return any agent that hasn't synchronized, regardless of time frame. The result should look something like this.
Left-click the checkbox on the left to select which license(s) you would like to reclaim and click Reclaim Licenses. These node licenses, as well as application licenses issued by SWS have just become available for other clients to connect and stream. Should one of the previously inactive machines come online again, the agent will claim a new license (granted one is available) and continue to function normally.
Hello Gene,
Nice article. Which version of SWS was this functionality included in first?
SK.
I need to correct myself. What I said is accurate accept for the check-in time. The license is only consumed when the agent starts streaming an application. Here is an overview of some of the actions the agent performs and their impact to licensing.
These actions do NOT consume a node license
This action does consume a node license
When the above takes place, the date/time is recorded as the last active time. An environment that streams applications with offline disabled, should see this value change more frequently, due to a regular requirement to request blocks. Whereas an environment with apps provisioned for offline use, will have a less frequent occurrence of changes to the last active time, since applications are cached 100% and no more streaming occurs until the next streaming event.
I didn't even realize it was that easy. Thanks so much!
Hi Massimo,
This particular screen shows status based on the communication between the backend, and the streaming agent. When you logon the agent service starts, and checks in with the STE and registers as a check-in time. This value corresponds to the "Innactive Since" variable, or the last check-in time.
thanks for this article! it is very useful!
Can you explain what is the event that trigger the update of the session inactive client?
if all the package are in offline mode the only event that update that value is a streaming session? or the launch of the application?