Overview – READ THIS FIRST

What is RLM Cloud?

RLM Cloud is a hosted license server farm, managed by Reprise Software. With RLM Cloud, you provision software license servers and deploy licenses to your customers which do not require any installation by your customer’s administrators. Since you deploy both the license servers and the licenses in RLM Cloud, there is no need for Activation Software such as RLM’s Activation Pro if you are using RLM Cloud.

When you use RLM Cloud to run your license servers, there is never an issue of customers wanting to move a license server or rehost an application. All the licenses are under your control, in RLM Cloud. Issues related to license servers running on virtual machines, dongles to lock license servers, spoofed hostids, and other issues related to license servers being under the control of your customers all go away with RLM Cloud.

How RLM Cloud Works

In RLM Cloud, you manage a set of license server hosts which run the license server processes for your customers. The management software is called RLM Cloud, and it is a web-based application, hosted on Reprise servers. RLM Cloud is a pure Software-as-a-Service offering - there is no software for you or your customers to install.

One thing to note is that there is very little that is special about the license server processes that run in RLM Cloud – they are, other than management interfaces, standard RLM servers. What this means is that your applications, built using RLM, will operate equally well with the traditional on-premises license servers or with RLM Cloud. This also means that you can deploy a mixture of on-premises and RLM Cloud servers, as your customer requirements dictate. You should note that there are some special management interfaces in the copy of the RLM server that runs RLM Cloud, but your ISV server is identical.

Requirements for Using RLM Cloud

While RLM Cloud uses the standard RLM servers, support for the CUSTOMER line in the license file is required. This means that your application must use RLM v12.0BL2 or later, and RLM v12.1BL2 or later is recommended. (While the CUSTOMER line was introduced in RLM v11.3, support was enhanced in v12.0 and v12.0 is required.)

The RLM Cloud Software

The RLM Cloud software allows you to:

Maintain a customer database.
Easily provision new customers, their licenses, and new license server hosts.
Add and subtract licenses for customers.
Monitor the state of customer license servers and licenses in use.
Rotate/download log files.
Shutdown/restart customer license servers.

All customer server provisioning and license data is contained in a MySQL database in RLM Cloud. The servers which serve your customer’s licenses are dedicated to you (i.e., no license server machines are shared between Reprise customers).

What Happens if My Customer Doesn’t Have an Internet Connection?

In this case, you can deploy a normal on-premises RLM license server. Your software works completely locally if you desire.

RLM Cloud Overview/Theory of Operation

In this manual, we assume you are familiar with license managers in general, and RLM in particular. This manual describes how to use RLM Cloud in place of the traditional on-premises license servers which have been the staple of license management for years.

This section will discuss how RLM Cloud organizes things. For a detailed description of the commands you will use, first read Getting Started, then read the individual command descriptions in RLM Cloud Command Descriptions.

In RLM Cloud, everything starts with a customer (a customer is company and contact). License servers are associated with customers, and everything is referenced from the customer abbreviation. While you do not need to enter individual customer contacts (i.e., employee names), you must, at a minimum, enter the company name and abbreviation. Everything else about the customer is optional, and in fact, when you create a company, there will be a dummy contact created called [none]. If you enter an actual contact person, you can delete the [none] contact if you like. Until you enter a company, you will not be able to create license servers.

Once you have created a company you can then provision one or more license servers for that company/customer. The license servers will be named “abbrev”, “abbrev1”, “abbrev2”, … “abbrevN” for this customer, where “abbrev” is the customer abbreviation you entered when you created the customer’s company. After you create a license server for the customer, you will no longer be able to change the customer’s abbreviation (unless you delete all that customer’s license servers first).

Now that you have a company and a license server, you will need that server to serve some licenses. The first step is to create what we call product definitions. If you are familiar with RLM Activation Pro, the product definitions are very similar, although some of the details are different, since RLM Cloud supports metered and token-based licenses. Once you have created one or more product definitions, you can then add licenses to the server you created earlier, then write the licenses to the license server, and start the server running.

At that point, you are ready to give your customer the one-line license file that describes their server, and they are ready to run your software.

That is the high-level overview of RLM Cloud. There are many details missing from this description, but this gives you the basics to get started.

RLM Cloud Infrastructure Overview

There are 2 components to the RLM Cloud system: the management system (rlmcloud.com/manage), and the individual license server machines. ISVs each have one or more dedicated license server VMs, and rlmcloud.com is shared across all the ISVs.

License service operates even when rlmcloud.com is down, because your license server VM is independent of rlmcloud.com.

You (the ISV) can provision a second VM for your license servers and use it as a failover server if you like. In fact, you can split the primary duties across the 2 servers and each one can act as a failover for the other one. Or you can have 2 or more independent license server VMs.

As far as backups are concerned, Reprise Software backs up the rlmcloud.com database every night, as well as the individual server machine databases. Everything else on the license server machines (except for log files) can be re-created from the management console on rlmcloud.com with the press of a single button. In addition to the backups above, we do daily image backups of the rlmcloud.com system.

We monitor every server at 2-minute intervals, and the uptime statistics are available in the rlmcloud.com GUI.