From "Try & Buy" to Production Database - Page 4

Licensing Procedure

We will start with a very basic situation, where we have installed a DB2 database. It is 90 days "Try & Buy" database version 8.1 for Sun Solaris.

Test database license information:

>> db2licm -l 
Product Name                  = "DB2 Enterprise - Extended Edition"
Product Password              = "PASS"
Version Information           = "8.1"
Expiry Date                   = "01.04.2003 (Try & Buy)"
Concurrent Connect User Policy = "Disabled"
Registered Connect User Policy = "Disabled"
Enforcement Policy            = "Soft Stop"
Number of processors          = "4"
Number of licensed processors = "1"
Annotation                    = ""
Other information             = ""

Installed DB2 database is version 8.1 and it is DB2 Enterprise Extended Edition.

This version is licensed for 1 processor on a 4-processor machine.

One very important parameter regarding licensing is the Enforcement Policy.

The Enforcement Policy has two possible values with the following meanings:

• HARD specifies that unlicensed requests will not be allowed.
• SOFT specifies that unlicensed requests will be logged but not restricted.

To register a new license instead of an existing Try & Buy, we need the distribution CD with the real database license. The full pathname to the license key is /cdrom/db2/license/db2udbeee.lic

# cat db2udbeee.lic
License Certificate for XXXXXX IBM DB2 UDB Enterprise-Extended Edition, V8.1
[LicenseCertificate]
VendorName=IBM Toronto Lab
VendorPassword=XXXXXXXXXXXXXX
VendorID=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
ProductName=DB2 Enterprise - Extended Editi
ProductID=XXXX
ProductVersion=8.1
ProductPassword=PASS
ProductAnnotation=
LicenseStyle=nodelocked
LicenseStartDate=XXXXXX
LicenseDuration=13932
LicenseEndDate=12/31/2037
LicenseCount=1
MultiUseRules=
RegistrationLevel=3
TryAndBuy=No
SoftStop=No
TargetType=ANY
TargetTypeName=Open Target
TargetID=ANY
ExtendedTargetType=
ExtendedTargetID=
DerivedLicenseStyle=
DerivedLicenseStartDate=
DerivedLicenseEndDate=
DerivedLicenseAggregateDuration=
SerialNumber=
Upgrade=No
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# 
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.00.00.00.00.00.00.00.00 xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx "" "7.1"
#[admin_comment] "IBM Toronto Lab" "DB2 Enterprise - Extended Editi" "xxxxxxxxx" "0" "1"
#

As root user we are going to add a new license:

/opt/IBMdb2/V8/adm/db2licm a  /cdrom/db2/license/db2udbeee.lic

The registration process will put the product license key in the file nodelock located on /var/lum/ with the following rights:

-rw-r--r--   1 root     other        313 Feb  6 13:52 nodelock

Nodelock file content after registration:

# cat nodelock
# 
5effaa0123d34e.01.00.11.0d.21.01.01.00 fffe832apvbeema4ipvamqa "" "7.1"
#[admin_comment] "IBM Toronto Lab" "DB2 Enterprise Edition" "3546226633" "0" "1"

Every new separate licensed product added to an existing installation will have a license entry in the nodelock file.

After registration, we will restart the database and check thelicensing information again:

>> db2licm -l
Product Name                  = "DB2 Enterprise - Extended Edition"
Product Password              = "PASS"
Version Information           = "8.1"
Expiry Date                   = "Permanent"
Concurrent Connect User Policy = "Disabled"
Registered Connect User Policy = "Disabled"
Enforcement Policy            = "Soft Stop"
Number of processors          = "4"
Number of licensed processors = "1"
Annotation                    = ""
Other information             = ""

Database error log (db2diag.log) is reporting the following error message:

SQL8017W  The number of processors on this machine exceeds the defined 
entitlement of "1" for the product "DB2 Enterprise - Extended Edition".  The 
number of processors on this machine is "4".  You should purchase additional 
processor entitlements from your IBM representative or authorized dealer and 
update your license using the License Center or the db2licm command line 
utility. For more information on updating processor licenses, refer to the 
Quick Beginnings manual for your platform.  For more information on the 
db2licm utility, refer to the DB2 Command Reference.

We are getting this error because we have 4 CPUs on the machine and we had registered only one CPU. We need to register all of the processors using the database password:

$ db2licm -n PASS 4

New license information after processor registration:

>> db2licm -l
Product Name                  = "DB2 Enterprise - Extended Edition"
Product Password              = "PASS"
Version Information           = "8.1"
Expiry Date                   = "Permanent"
Concurrent Connect User Policy = "Disabled"
Registered Connect User Policy = "Disabled"
Enforcement Policy            = "Soft Stop"
Number of processors          = "4"
Number of licensed processors = "4"
Annotation                    = ""
Other information             = ""

The DB2 database is fully registered for 4 processors, without the Connect User Policy enabled.

For per user connection licensing we would need to add additional Conncurent or Registered User licenses (db2licm -u num_user_licenses).

Conclusion

DB2 offers outstanding technology with affordable prices for software licensing, support and upgrades. The user is obligated to provide internal audit on license use and to report changes in license configuration periodically to IBM.

Support for older database versions is still provided and working well.

Can we expect that IBM will cut support and press customers to recheck compliance for older database versions like Oracle did? We'll have to wait and see...

» See All Articles by Columnist Marin Komadina