Before diving deep into Cisco licenses specifically, let’s first understand some basics about licenses.
What is a License? In the world of IT, a license is an agreement or permission to use and operate on intellectual property or product. It also serves as a binding document or guidelines to use the product without violating the rules or copyright agreements. For example, to use an authenticated version of OS on your personal computers, you need a license from the vendor. A license is also known as a Key.
Cisco is one of the major hardware and software vendors for Networking products in IT. Cisco Licenses are of various types. Cisco also offers Smart Licensing which provides a flexible model and streamlines the process of licensing (activation/deactivation).
Licenses are managed in Cisco by Unified Communications Manager. It caters to all types of Cisco Licenses, based on the total number of users and their associated devices and devices configured on the system. In this when the devices are added, a call from the Unified Communications Manager is sent to the Cisco Prime License Manager which then compares the requirement with the installed and available licenses and reverts to the compliance status.
Let’s take a look at the various types of Cisco Licenses.
User Only Licensing: In this type of licensing, a Cisco License is generated and associated with the unique user-id of the owner. If the user-id changes, the license becomes obsolete and cannot be transferred. An important aspect of this type of Licensing is that the user-id must be associated with a device. Merely adding a user-id without any device doesn’t exhaust or consume the license.
Device Only Licensing: As the name suggests this type of licensing deals with the devices. In this, whenever a new device is added, it is scanned for a user-id associated with the device. If there is no user-id, then the Cisco license which is required for the device becomes a Device Only License. These licenses are governed by the type of device.
User and Device Licensing: In this, the licensing is governed by the number and type of devices tagged to a user-id. These can be of various types like Essential, Basic, or Enhanced. This generally holds true for one-to-one device and user-id mapping which means one user-id is tagged to one device. In the case where a single user-id is tagged to multiple devices, the number of licenses depends on the number of devices. For two devices, a Cisco Enhanced Plus license is used whereas for more than two devices, a Cisco Workspace License is needed.
There is another category of licenses for Cisco Hardware known as Perpetual and non-Perpetual Licensing.
Perpetual Licenses are basically lifetime Licenses which means a license for hardware is valid as long as the life of the hardware or in other terms, as long as the hardware is in use. These licenses get obsolete once the hardware is replaced.
A non-perpetual license, sometimes also known as a subscription license is like any other subscription model where the license needs to be renewed once the subscription time is over. This is usually very profitable for the vendors as it generates cash flow.