What Is Smart Licensing?

What Is Smart Licensing?

A Cisco Smart Account provides storage space for Smart-enabled devices to be organized by their Smart licenses. It can organize and activate product licenses, monitor licenses in use, and track Cisco license purchases. With direct access, it has a real-time view of smart licensing support products. The IT administrator can handle electronic licenses and user reports in your company’s smart account through Smart Software Manager.

What Is Smart Licensing?

Cisco Smart Account

The following smart accounts types can be used to acquire and manage your Cisco Smart License For Customer Smart Account , Partner Holding Account And Customer Smart Account.

Cisco has introduced a new method for customers and partners to manage software licenses. Cisco Smart License is a brand-new feature that enables you to view and manage access to all of your Cisco software licenses and entitlements across your entire organization. You can organize and manage your licenses by departments, locations, or license types across your organization by setting up up to 200 Virtual Accounts after you’ve created your Smart Account.

For better insight you can read “Getting Started with Cisco Smart Accounts“

With Cisco Smart License, you can always have access to your licenses and software without depending on your provider for distribution. With your Cisco Smart License, all the information and licenses you require are just a click away. No more waiting for a provider to deliver licenses and holding up projects.

A Customer is usually stated to as just regular a Smart Account which allows customers to organize all their licenses, devices, and specific license treaties and manage user access to their bargains and entitlements. A Smart Account is required for digital labor of a license Similar to requiring a customer’s physical address for hardware baggage or commodities. Later the values are determined in the Smart Account, they can be accessed by using a smart account login within Cisco Smart Software Manager (CSSM).

Cisco Smart Account Benefits

Adopting a smart account encourages customers to manage and monitor their licenses, appliances, and devices which use a special license. This item makes it simpler to manage license entitlements and eases the license migration strategies. The benefits of using Cisco Smart Account are:

• Smart License lessens order lead times from 4 days to 90 minutes after holds are removed and eliminate the conflict of marketing with large physical cargoes.
• Smart License-enabled products, requiring only one company token to be entered during product configuration, will allow the software to self-register, eliminating the need to enter PAKs.
• It brings Visibility into devices and software that you have purchased and deployed, Automatic license activation, Product simplicity with standard software offers, licensing program, and policies, and the Possibility of reduced functional costs.
• Cisco is gaining this model easier reducing the complexity of product SKUs by working toward entrenching compatible and several licensing methods in these models.
• A Smart Account is a container that allows you to organize all of your Cisco licenses, devices, account agreements and users access.
• Cisco Smart Software Licensing Support all Cisco products. For presently, it is usable for the additional group of products Like Cisco Catalyst 9000 such as the ASR1K, ISR1K, ISR4K, Catalyst 9800, Nexus 9000, Cisco Security Products
• Older Hybrid licensing models, like PAK, honor prime, Cisco Prime License Manager, or other ownership licensing models. They default to employing their traditional licensing model. customer may choose to activate Smart Licensing on the Hybrid licensing products.
• Rather than using traditional licenses (PAKs), Smart Software Licensing organizes a pool of software licenses or entitlements that can be used in a flexible and automated posture.

Virtual Accounts for Smart Licenses

• Virtual Accounts are the subfolders in a Smart Account, which enable you to internally organize licenses, devices, and user access.
• Virtual accounts are organizations of licenses and product models which can be built in Smart Software Manager to manage the licenses for each organization into practical elements.
• You can change a special product model between several virtual accounts and you can discard a specific product instance from the virtual account which subsequently removes it from the smart account and ultimately you can export the list of product instances to CSV file.
• The Product Instances tab of the Smart Software Licensing page shows information about all of the product models in your virtual account.
• While ordering, permanently assign to a specific Virtual Account within your Customer Smart Account or Partner Holding Account.
• Virtual accounts could be used to organize licenses by business company, product category, IT group, or whatever makes the point for companies.
• Create Virtual Accounts to organize your assets by location, technology group, business departments or reporting structure for ease of management and Keep it simple.

Partner Holding Account

Cisco partners can benefit from building a Partner Holding Account. A Partner Holding Account is used by partners to temporarily catalog orders before they are placed in the Customer Smart Accounts. When ordering, a partner may not know the end customer or their Smart Account up for, and rather will allocate the order to the Partner Holding Account temporal. Once the customer is specified, the partner can transfer the order to the Customer Smart Account. The main difference between Cisco Smart Account and a Partner Holding Account is that licenses can be expended only in a Smart Account Cisco, not in a Partner Holding Account.

Cisco Smart License Types

Cisco Permanent License Reservation (PLR)

If your devices cannot access the internet for security goals, you can optionally request permanent licenses for each Prime Access Registrar. Permanent license reservation (PLR) is a set of abilities that are built for highly secure environments, where communication with outside environments is impossible. Permanent licenses do not require frequent access to the License Authority. Like PAK licenses, you can buy a license and install the license key for Prime Access Registrar. It can easily switch between normal smart license mode and PLR mode. Prime Access Registrar can employ generally without constant communication with either the CSSM or the Smart Software Satellite (on-site collector). A single Universal license PID that authorizes all valid product functionalities will be available, including a limitless amount of counted licenses as well.

Cisco Specific License Reservation (SLR)

At a high level, Specific License Reservation (SLR) is a required licensing model that is related to node-locked licensing. When you activate Prime Access Registrar, there is a one-time manual exchange of information with the CSSM as part of product authorization and configuration. No more exchange with the CSSM or Smart Software Satellite is required. The main difference between PLR and SLR is, that SLR allows you to select the required licenses, wherein the as PLR is a single license that activates all the functionalities of the product. For SLR, all the licenses that are current for smart accounts are applicable.

Cisco SSM On-Prem license

The Cisco Smart Software Manager Cisco SSM On-Prem license server is formulated to mirror the Cisco Smart Software Manager’s license workspace knowledge through a common user interface and related features. It is targeted for service providers and Cisco partners who want to organize various customer accounts through a single management portal instead of individual customers organizing their own accounts. The Cisco SSM On-Prem license server must communicate with Cisco Smart Software Manager periodically to appropriately perform.