Resilient Hostid Handling
Hostid handling in modern computing environments is inherently fragile due to its reliance on system identifiers that can change over time, such as network interface attributes and other hardware or OS-derived values. In both physical and virtual environments, systems are no longer static.
Routine and legitimate activities can modify these identifiers without altering the actual identity of the machine. When such changes occur, the license server may no longer recognize the system as the originally licensed device. This results in hostid mismatches, leading to unexpected license checkout failures, licensing service disruption, and the need for manual intervention to restore licensing continuity.
This section describes scenarios in which the local license server hostid can change and explains how resilient hostid handling addresses these situations.
Handling Scenarios of Changing Hostids
The following use cases highlight common situations that can lead to licensing disruption and describe why resilient hostid handling may be needed. In all use cases, the target is for licensing to remains stable across network changes so valid customers do not encounter unexpected license failures or require producer operator or support engineer intervention.
|
Use Case |
Scenario |
Impact |
|
Removable or changing network adapters |
A customer provisions and activates volume license counts on a local license server device. Activation succeeds, and the server is bound to the fingerprints captured when connected to a corporate network. The user later switches to a different network (for example, home Wi-Fi or a different docking station). |
The change in network adapter results in a different Ethernet identifier being used for hostid calculation. The back office treats the same machine as a new device, causing the license server not to allow checkout without any user or product-initiated change. In most cases, this situation is flagged as suspected cloning during an otherwise legitimate change or maintenance event. |
|
OS-Level identifier randomization (privacy and security) |
Customers enable operating system privacy or security features that randomize hardware or network identifiers as part of standard OS configuration. |
Randomized identifiers can lead to a new hostid being generated, breaking the association with existing licenses. This behavior can appear unpredictable to customers and is difficult to diagnose. |
|
Legitimate hardware or virtualization changes |
Customers perform routine system operations such as hardware upgrades, system restores, virtual machine snapshots, migrations, or reboots. |
These legitimate changes can modify underlying identifiers used for hostid calculation, causing the local license server to reject the machine as unlicensed and interrupt application availability. |
About Resilient Hostid Handling
Your producer can enable resilient hostid handling for your local license server to improve license stability in environments where system identifiers may change.
Resilient hostid handling is currently supported for:
| • | Windows: physical and virtual machines (command-based installer only) |
| • | Linux: virtual machines only |
When resilient hostid handling is enabled, the local license server uses additional system information to determine its hostid. This allows the hostid to remain stable even when individual identifiers—such as Ethernet IDs—change due to legitimate system or environment changes.
Implementing Resilient Hostid Handling
To enable resilient hostid handling on the local license server, your producer must set the policy binding.enable.resilient.hostid in the producer-settings.xml file.
| • | true—Resilient hostid handling is enabled. |
| • | false—Resilient hostid handling is disabled. |
During the command-based installation on Windows, you are prompted whether to install the MetaDaemon service. The MetaDaemon service is required for resilient hostid handling on physical machines (see Running the Command-Based Installer).
In Windows installations, the flexnetls-hostmetadata.exe executable is required to collect physical machine identifiers used during hostid validation. This file must be present in the server directory, regardless of whether resilient hostid handling is enabled.
Note:Resilient hostid handling is supported only when the license server is installed using the command-based installer. The InstallAnywhere installer does not include the MetaDaemon service and therefore does not support this capability.