PROTECTION
Virtual Systems –
Undermining Licensing?
Virtual systems are popular. These days,
wherever possible, services and solutions
are virtualized. The advantages are plain to
see: The services can easily be migrated from
hardware to hardware or scaled up as re-
quired. Replacing a server used to be a major
undertaking; now, services or entire virtual
machines can be moved in an instant. Gone is
that nail-biting moment upon reboot: Will the
old server start up again? Life today is good
for administrators – at least in this respect.
Administrators trust their data centers, and
they trust the security mechanisms in place.
In most cases, that trust is well-placed and
well-founded. Software is installed and just
works as intended. But consider the same
situation from the software vendor’s point
of view. When the software is installed on
a virtual machine, who is in control? Does
virtualization mean a loss of control? Who
can stop users from cloning entire virtual
machines if they want more copies of their
software running?
Wibu-Systems offers several answers to these
questions in the form of its licensing solutions.
The first choice that deserves to be mentioned
is represented by CmDongles, powerful pieces
of hardware that are not particularly well-liked
in data center environments. There are options,
however, such as the use of dongle servers
that can accommodate multiple USB dongles
for access by the other hardware in the data
center. CmDongles might also be the right
option for single physical servers that need
to be operated e.g. because certain hardware
components are required in the system.
Whatever the case may be, the CodeMeter
license server is so resource-efficient that it
can operate unnoticed alongside virtually any
system.
The current most popular choice is a soft-
ware-based license, or CmActLicense, which
uses special cryptographic operations to
bind itself to certain properties of the target
system. CodeMeter naturally knows whenever
it is running on a virtual system and uses a
special combination of binding parameters in
such cases. Some configurations allow CmAct-
License to be bound to a set of properties of
the virtualization system guaranteed by its
provider, such as systems hosted in Azure
environments. A similar option is in the works
for other virtualization environments.
The most recent option is the use of a
CmCloudLicense. Wibu-Systems operates the
CodeMeter Cloud exclusively in a data center
based in Frankfurt, Germany, where the Wibu
Operating Services specialists work to ensure
the permanent availability of the licenses. Any
CodeMeter installation on a user’s system can
be linked with the CodeMeter Cloud, giving
software vendors and their users the full
freedom to use all of the power of virtualiza-
tion – safe in the knowledge that the licensing
system works as it should.
There are many solutions to the challenges
presented by virtualization – all you need to
do is pick the one that is right for you.
Container environments like Docker represent
a special challenge for licensing purposes.
While these environments are especially
well-insulated and optimized for scaling
up, there are ways to license the software
running inside such containers. In these cases,
licensing needs to be considered long before
ever thinking about the eventual release.
Licensing should be in the picture when
deciding about how services are allocated
to individual containers. The last issue of our
KEYnote (38) explored several scenarios for
this approach.
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