Tekla Structures on-premises licensing

Tekla Structures
2021
Tekla Structures

Tekla Structures on-premises licensing

The information on this page is not valid for online licenses.

On-premises licenses are an alternative to the default online licensing method. Whether the license is on-premises or online is determined when you purchase a license, so you cannot switch your licenses between the two distribution methods yourself. You activate on-premises licenses on a license server that you install on your own computer hardware. Tekla Structures installations for one or more users connect to the license server to reserve a license.

On-premises licensing technology

With on-premises licensing, Tekla Structures uses FlexNet (FlexNet Publisher License Management) licensing system by Flexera Software. We provide our own Tekla-specific tools for managing the licenses on top of the common FlexNet platform, replacing some of the standard tools you may have encountered when using other software products that use FlexNet for licensing.

The license server software is compatible with several versions of Tekla Structures. To see which license server version to use with your current Tekla Structures version, see Hardware recommendations for Tekla 2020 license server. The licenses are also compatible with older versions of Tekla Structures in addition to the highest allowed version stated in the license. The license is sent to you attached in an email as an entitlement certificate HTML file.

Note:

Keep backup copies of your license entitlements in a safe place.

Local licensing on your workstation

If there are few users in your organization and you do not need to share the same licenses between users, you will install a license server directly on the Tekla Structures workstation. When you activate a license on the local license server, Tekla Structures always uses that license and you can also start Tekla Structures offline without borrowing a license. If you want to use this type of setup, see Installation and licensing workflow.

For organizations with many users, it is not optimal to install and manage a license server on each workstation because of the extra work involved, lack of visibility and inability to flexibly share licenses between users. In this situation, it is better to set up a central license server in your internal network.

License server in your local area network (floating licenses)

The illustration below shows how licensing works in a typical corporate setup where licenses are activated on a centrally-managed license server, and there is a mix of on-premises and online licenses in use.

  1. An administrator (main user or IT administrator) receives entitlement certificates for new and updated FlexNet licenses as email attachments.

  2. The administrator activates and manages the FlexNet licenses in the Tekla License Administration Tool on the license server installed at your organization.

    For successful activation, the system must be able to contact Trimble's online license activation service.

  3. The administrator adds users to your organization and allows access to your purchased online licenses in the Tekla Online Admin tool.

    Exception: users must get their free learning license themselves at the Tekla Campus site.

  4. Tekla Structures installations on the end-users' workstations reserve a license on the license server or in the cloud when a user starts Tekla Structures or joins Tekla Model Sharing. When the user stops using Tekla Structures, the license reservation is revoked.

    • You can optionally allow users to borrow licenses for a set period of time, which allows the user to start Tekla Structures without network access to the license server. To borrow a license, the user must have the license borrow tool installed on their workstation.

    • Online licenses cannot be borrowed; users must have internet access to start Tekla Structures with an online license. For more information about online licenses, see Manage Trimble Identities and Tekla Online licenses.

Tekla Structures holds licenses in trusted storage. This means that Tekla Structures does not support three-server redundancy, where licenses are held in license files. However, you may have any number of license servers, and use search paths for defining and finding them.

Using multiple license servers in one company

You may want to spread your license pool on several servers in your company. You may have offices in many cities, each office with its own license server, or you may simply want to divide the license pool to minimize disruption caused by server downtime.

You do not have to activate all of the licenses on the same license server even if they are on the same entitlement certificate. For example, you can divide your total license entitlement on several servers simply by activating one half of your licenses on one server and the other half of the licenses on another server. Or, as another example, you can activate some of the licenses on a common server and the rest locally on each user’s computer. You can easily change the location of the licenses by deactivating them on one license server and activating on another so you can adjust the number of licenses to changes in your user base over time.

In Tekla Structures, you can define two server addresses separated by a semicolon (;). This way, if there is a maintenance break on one of the servers, users can obtain the license from the other server.

Note:

Defining several license servers may slow down the starting of Tekla Structures. Therefore, we do not recommend defining more than two servers.

License server hardware

The Tekla license server does not need high performance hardware. However, it is important to ensure that the network connection and server hardware are reliable, and to maintain the server system carefully.

Note:

Deactivate your licenses before you make changes to the hardware or perform a major operating system upgrade on the license server computer. Keep copies of your license entitlement certificate(s) in a safe place in case something goes wrong, so that you can easily and quickly activate the deactivated licenses on a different system. You can only activate the same licenses again if they have first been deactivated on the previous system. If the license server system becomes permanently inoperable with the licenses still activated, contact your local Tekla support for assistance.

See Tekla license server 2020 hardware recommendations for information on operating systems and virtual machine platforms.

Configuration features for on-premises licenses

You have fine-grained control over the license use:

  • You can control license use based on the license type (enterprise/domestic) or Tekla Structures configuration.

  • You can define minimum and maximum numbers of licenses users/user groups have available.

  • You can allow or prevent license borrowing from named users/user groups.

The configurations can be done based on host addresses, individual user names or by user groups. See Modify on-premises license access rights (tekla.opt) for more information.

Checklists for on-premises licensing implementation

There are several prerequisites the administrator needs to take into account before starting with FlexNet licensing. Take a look at the following listings:

Additional information sources

In addition to Tekla Structures specific documentation, you can find useful information on the FlexNet system in the documents provided with the installation and in Tekla Downloads. The following FlexNet License Administration Guides by Flexera Software are generic guides that contain, for example, instructions on how to create user groups and manage access rights:

  • C:\Tekla\License\Server\fnp_LicAdmin.pdf
  • C:\Tekla\License\Server\LicenseAdministration.pdf
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