Manual license selection allows the customer to select specific licenses available in the customer account and apply the selected licenses to the cluster. This feature can be used when:

• Mixing license types (e.g., Life-of-Device and Capacity Based Licensing) in a single cluster

• Selecting term licenses with specific expiration dates

• Selecting licenses tagged for specific use cases (e.g., owned by a particular organization)

Manual license selection is available as an option to license products on Prism Element and Prism Central. 

Where is the Manual License selection option?

You see it on the portal’s ‘Manage licenses’ page displayed after .csf file from Prism (PC or PE appropriately) is uploaded. When ‘Select License’  is selected on each card, The pop-up has a ‘manually manage licenses’ option.

How to access ‘manually manage licenses’ option on licensing workflow on portal:

In the support portal navigate to Products--->Licenses--->manage licenses

• Manage licenses page: Here ‘Choose license Tags’ block is displayed only if license tags were created by the user on Licenses > Purchases page. Selecting a tag or ‘All licenses’ option enables the upload file option. Customer is required to upload the .csf file downloaded from Prism.

• Next page displays a card layout of various products (AOS, File server, Advanced replication etc ) on the cluster ‘Manage Licenses’ page.

• Click ‘Select license’ option on each card , this opens a pop-up menu and here you have ‘Manually manage licenses’ option as an alternate option to existing license option, which just selects licenses expiring the earliest.

Note: Licenses have to be selected for product in the respective card. 

Manually Manage licenses feature workflow:

• Click on the “manually manage licenses” option. Next card will give you option to select licenses as per their Expiry date, License level for the product. You will see licenses based on type of node i.e. appliance model will take up node based license and Software only node would use up capacity based licenses (cores and flash). 

• If a cluster has different model of assets, you will have a dropdown option for each model which shows you list of licenses where you can select desired license by putting a “check mark” against it.
• Once you have selected desired licenses, you get the “save option”.

• Next page after clicking on “save” gives a Summary page that displays all the licenses selected. You will see a “Generate License file” on the bottom right corner of the page . Clicking on this downloads a License Summary File which can be applied to PC or PE appropriately.

Note: Manual License selection is not an option on 1-click licensing workflow.