The skinny on FMS2.0.1 Licensing

The new licensing scheme got you confused? Need to know what's up, get the 411? Look no further then because here it all is in laymans terms.

First off, with this new update to version 2.0.1 there is a new license scheme.

In case you are wondering what the old one was (the one that was introduced upon the release of FMS2.0) it was 150 max connections with unlimited BW. This caused an uproar around the world and Adobe changed their minds :)

So, the new licensing scheme and how it works. The brand new licensing manager programmed inside of FMS is setup to handle connection/bandwidth profiles now.

What are profiles and what does that mean to you?

Currently there are three profiles that come with the install of FMS2. Once you have installed the server, you can check in "licenses" directory in the install directory and you'll see the following profile files:

150.pro
1000-40.pro
2500-25.pro

These are used when you tell FMS what profile you want to use (I'll talk about this farther down). Each profile has different settings in it. Like, 150.pro is the original 150 connections and unlimited bandwidth. 1000-40.pro is 1000 connections and 40Mbps, and to finish it off 2500-25.pro is (you guessed it) 2500 connections and 25Mbps (which is exactly what FCS1.5 Pro had).

So what does this mean to you? Well, the first thing off is that upgrading to FMS2 from FCS1.5 is a logical choice. With the original of only 150 connections and unlimited BW, if you had apps that required more connections (which was very highly likely), you would actually have to go out and buy more licenses just to run what you were originally running..

Anyways, you can only have one profile in service at one time, but in turn, you can switch profiles whenever you want. This means that say for example this week you have a video seminar that you want to get out to a limited amount of people. In this case you are most likely to need a lot of BW, but not so many connections. For that you might change to the 150.pro profile. On the flip side, say next week you have a huge chat conference that you want to get on. For this, you would switch it over to the 2500-25.pro profile.

As you can see, you can match up your server to your apps now. This gives a bit more leverage of what you have bought in comparison to FCS1.5, and far more over that original licensing scheme that was thought up.

What does this mean for the future?

Well, thanks to this line of thinking, it's now possible for Adobe to create profiles based on perhaps a request. If somebody says they don't need 1000 connections, but need more than 40Mbps. Perhaps at that time if there was enough demand, Adobe would put out a new profile that was 500 Connections and 50Mbps or something like that (I'm not doing the math.. but you get the picture I think).

So now that we all understand what is going on and why, how do we go about setting the server up for this? At the time of this writing, the information is not available except on the mailing list from figgyleaf, Flashcomm.

If you have done a clean install, you will find in your install directory a directory called "conf". Inside there is a file called fms.ini. This is a special file that sets all kinds of things, and one of those things is the license profile. If you have upgraded without uninstalling and deleting the files in the install directory, then this file will not get overwritten on the install and you have to add the tags in yourself.

So, inside the fms.ini file there is going to be an entry like this:

SERVER.ACTIVE_PROFILE =

This is where you want to set the above profiles, like for example the 2500-25.pro license setting would look like this:

SERVER.ACTIVE_PROFILE = 2500-25.pro

That's about it. If you do change this value, make sure to restart the server.

Now if you have done an update over a previous install, you'll need to add that line, along with one more in the server.xml file.

It's in the Root/Server tag and looks like this:

<ActiveProfile>${SERVER.ACTIVE_PROFILE}</ActiveProfile>

That may look funny at first, but it is just accessing the variables in the fms.ini file. You could in turn just forget the fms.ini file and write this:

<ActiveProfile>2500-25.pro</ActiveProfile>

It's the same thing.

That's about actually. If anybody has any questions, feel free to stick them in the comments and I'll do my best to answer them.

On a final note, pricing information is available here, you can also buy from reseller Uvault here, and upgrade purchase here, and here is the link to the details on this update (which is free of course to the current customers of FMS2)

Posted by Graeme at February 17, 2006 04:36 PM