Networking Pros & Cons

[krichison1]

Does anybody have network experiences?
Our company is trying to decide if it wants to buy several stand alone stations or go to a network license.
I did a search and found some info.
Need some pros or cons.

Thanks

[GreyHippo]

When you say stand alone station or a networks license I am assuming you mean software (auotcad) licences. I think that one license of acad can be set up as a network edition or a standalone addition.

The only cons I can think of, for networks, are setting up the network and troubleshooting conenction problems.

[jonathan.landeros]

I've done a fair amount of network licensing, and this is IMHO, the pros and cons that I've seen.

Network Licensing Pros
1. It allows you to install as many places as you want. The network license manager won't let you exceed the maximum number of licenses you have. (if you have 5 licenses, and all 5 are being used, User 6 will can't log on until one user logs off).
2. You can create network deployments that make it easier (and faster) to create consistent installs (this can now be done for stand-alones too). Since the network maintains the licenses, you don't have to authorize each station.
3. Once the license manager is set up, it's bulletproof (it can literally run for years without a hitch). However, notice I also have a con for it too.

Network licenses Cons
1. More expensive. You have to pay a network activation fee. However, this can still be cheaper than buying full seats for part time users.
2. It makes you vulnerable to network issues. If you network goes down, you lose ALL your licenses until it comes back up, although distributed and redundant systems can mitigate some of this.
3. The network license manager can be a little fussy sometimes, and it can be broken by some pretty simple things, such as port blocking. You want to spend some time getting familiar with it, and you also want to plan ahead for when you do anything with the license manager, since you can shut down all network licenses if things go wrong. An ounce of prevention is definitely worth a pound of cure.

I hope you find this info helpful. I've set up a whole bunch of network licenses, and I like the system. The license manager is generally pretty stable and pretty simple, once you get over it's quirks.

[Mike.Perry]

2. It makes you vulnerable to network issues. If you network goes down, you lose ALL your licenses until it comes back up, although distributed and redundant systems can mitigate some of this.Hi

The following Technical Document from the AutoCAD Knowledge Base on the Autodesk web site might be of interest to someone...

ID: TS66065 - Meaning of term "heartbeat" (http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/item?siteID=123112&id=2887674&linkID=2475323)

Have a good one, Mike

[bbeck]

More pro's and con's....

Pro - license borrowing is a very nice feature of network installs provided the machine needing to borrow a license has network access.

Con - unlike stand alone or multi-seat stand alone a network install will not allow you to install an additional license on your PC at home. Even if you do adhear to the concurrent licensing agreements in the ELUA.

Brian Beck
CAD Manager
Rainforth Grau Architects

[RobertAitken]

Does anybody have network experiences?
Our company is trying to decide if it wants to buy several stand alone stations or go to a network license.
I did a search and found some info.
Need some pros or cons.

Thanks
If your company intends to expand its CAD resource in the future then get the network license. We moved to it when we had 30 users and 30 licenses. We eventually had 70 users and 45 licenses. Biggest problem was getting users used to shutting down apps when not in use. Although a search in google will turn up some solutions.

Yes you will become reliant on a good network but if the network is designed and maintained then these shouldn't be a problem. Distributed or redundant servers are a bit overkill for a small CAD group. You can run the license manager over a WAN so remote users can collect a license from the LM.

Like most things there are the pros and cons. My own viewpoint would be to use the LM. It will give you more flexibility in the long term.

Robert

[DarrenYoung]

2. It makes you vulnerable to network issues. If you network goes down, you lose ALL your licenses until it comes back up, although distributed and redundant systems can mitigate some of this.

From my experiance, if your network goes down, not much of anything will be going on anyway with other critical systems off line as well as your files.

And if it's just a server that goes down and looks as if it'll be out for a while, just install FlexLM on another server. A call to Adsk's auth code 800 number can get you a new license file bound to a different server in fairly short order.

[DarrenYoung]

Con - unlike stand alone or multi-seat stand alone a network install will not allow you to install an additional license on your PC at home. Even if you do adhear to the concurrent licensing agreements in the ELUA.

You should still be able to do this. All you need is a VPN tunnel via an internet connection at home to pull a license from work. I've tested this with even a 14.4 dial up and it's more that capable of pulling a license. You could also borrow then disconnect. And with yuor options file on the license server, you can control who can and can't get a license.

[paddymackey]

You might want to look at the way Cad will be used in you office before making the discussion on whether to get the stand-alone or network version.
If there's only a small number of users (5 or 6) or if it's a small company you might want the stand-alone version. It would save you €400 - 500 per license (at least thats the price difference over here) over the network version but deploying the stand-alone version is more troublesome.
Also, is there an advantage to using the network version for your company? Does everyone who needs Cad use it for the full day or are they only using it for a few hours per day. Do you need 1 license per user or are you going to share the licenses between the users. We had a problem when we first switched over to a network license version of Cad. The bosses would only pay for 4 licenses but we had 6 people using Cad, although 2 were only for a few hours per day. Result - constant phone calls every day from 2 people saying they couldn't open Cad. They then were left twiddling there thumbs if they had no other work to do until a license got freed up.
Losing the use of Cad while the network is down is also a fairly mute point in making the discussion because chances are all your drawings are going to be on a network drive anyway. Pointless having Autocad open if you can't get access to the drawings.

In general, the network license seems to be the way to go if you can justify the extra cost. It also eliminates the need for dongles hanging off the back of your PC. It just all comes down to the bottom line figure, the standalone is quite a bit cheaper for essentially the same piece of software. You just have more hassle setting it up.