Overview
The process and guidelines in this article has been update for the Lumerical license that is running on the Ansys License Manager
Prerequisites
- Access to Lumerical Amazon Linux AMI
- Create and configure your VPC and Security Group
- Create a key-pair
Pricing
For the license server, we recommend using a t3.nano instance with a 10GB gp2 EBS volume. Using AWS Cost Calculator this will roughly cost 4.80$/month to run (USD, 1$/month for storage and 3.80$ for compute). We recommend that you run this calculation yourself using the region you will be operating in for a more accurate and up to date estimate.
Note: The license server can be "stopped" at any time when it is not needed. You will continue to be charged for its EBS resources, but not for the EC2 resources. When the license server is started again the license service will automatically come back online (after a few minutes). If no longer wish to pay anything for this instance you can "terminate" it, however, you will lose any active license activations on the instance. For this reason, we recommend enabling "termination protection" when creating this instance to protect against accidental termination.
Important
DO NOT TERMINATE your license server instance as you will lose the HostID information used to activate your license.
Create a license server
We will create a small and inexpensive server to run the Lumerical license manager. Once you activate a license this server should persist until your license expires. You can stop (shutdown) this server to save costs when you aren’t running jobs. If you terminate (delete) the server you may invalidate your license file unless you detach and save the elastic network adapter. This more advanced use is not explained here.
To save effort building your own license server, Lumerical provides an Amazon Linux Amazon Machine Image (AMI) with all the software pre-loaded. To get access to the AMIs, follow the instructions here. To create your license server follow these steps:
- Navigate to the EC2 service in the AWS Console
- Hit the launch instance button
- Search for the AMI ID provided by Lumerical for the latest license manager server and select it
- Choose the t3.nano instance type
- Enable "Termination Protection" to protect against accidental termination of the License Server and the resultant loss of license activations.
- Select your VPC and Subnet.
- All the other default settings should be fine, check the video if in doubt
- Change the storage to "30GB gp2" or more depending on what other applications you need to run on the license server and accept the defaults in the next pages.
- On the configure security group, choose the group created for your cluster.
- Review and launch your instance, selecting your key pair when prompted.
- You will see your server instance running in your instances list
Install the license manager
Notes: The default install process of the client-server configuration on AWS is shown. The license server and compute machines running Lumerical are instances running on AWS. The default installation process for the Ansys License Manager is shown.
- Download and install the Ansys License Manager.
- Obtain the instance/machine HostID information from the Ansys LM Center. Or using the command line as shown here.
- Activate your entitlement from the Ansys Licensing Portal.
- Configure the license file with static ports and add/install this into the Ansys LM on your server/instance.
- Verify from theAnsys LM Center > Display FlexNet license status that license manager is up and running and the licenses are available for checkout.
- Log off or disconnect from your license server.
- Ensure that this license server instance is always up and running when you run simulations on your compute node.
- Take note of your license server's 'private IP address' from the AWS management console.
- You will use this for the Lumerical license configuration on your compute instance.
Checking license server status
SSH
At any time you can connect to the license server via ssh and check the status of your licenses by running the command:
/ansys_inc/shared_files/licensing/linx64/lmutil lmstat -a -c 1055@localhost
ANSYS license management center
- Log into your license server instance and open a web browser:
http://localhost:8095
See also
Remote connection to Linux with a graphical interface
Ansys license manager configuration and license file installation
Checking the ANSYS license server status and license usage from the client machine