Top things to know about your Chaos Licensing Setup

To ensure a smooth transition to the new licensing experience, we wanted to share some of the most important aspects and provide you with additional information and updates that you may find helpful:

New Enscape Licensing Experience

• Configure your setup once, and all Chaos products will work seamlessly.
• Activate Enscape usage with just a login.
• Experience it with the upcoming Enscape 4.1 release.

Multiple License Assignment & Administration

• It will no longer be possible to assign one seat to multiple users. Each license seat you assign will be reserved only for the user (email) to whom it is assigned.
• For instructions on setting up a Chaos license server without assigning licenses to specific users, please refer to our step-by-step process below.
• For guidance on setting up administrator and member/guest rights when assigning licenses to specific users, please refer to our Self-Service Portal User Guide.

We are committed to making this transition as smooth as possible and are here to assist you every step of the way. If you have any further questions or need assistance, please do not hesitate to contact our Customer Support team.

Top things to know about your Chaos Licensing Setup

All Chaos products need to be connected to a Chaos License Server to function on your machine. It allows you to easily activate more licenses right after the purchase and provides a way to stay offline while using your Chaos products when you need to. 

An instance of the Chaos License Server that uses the same user account may be installed more than once on the same internal network when on different workstations or servers to act as a redundancy measure. This is to make sure licenses are still obtainable during server downtime due to failures or maintenance, which is especially useful for organizations with multiple locations that share the same internal network.

The following are a few examples of how to best deploy license servers in multi-machine environments, depending on the needs.

Chaos Licensing Setup for Two-Machines

In a case where there are only a couple of machines, such as users with a workstation and a laptop, it’s best to install and activate the License Server on both machines.

Please note that any borrowed licenses will be available only on the License Server from which they were borrowed.

Chaos Licensing Setup for Small Studio Office

In a small office or studio environment, for example, with 10 workstations, it’s best to install and activate a single License Server for the office that is activated by the user account. All of the workstations will then need their license settings configured to use the IP address of that one license server machine as their primary server.

The license server should be visible from the local network by default, however, you can check Settings > Expert mode to make sure that Network Visibility is set to Visible to Local Network.

To make configuration changes easier, a single vrlclient.xml file may be loaded from a shared network drive for all networked office machines requiring a license. For more details on how to do that, Sharing vrlclient.xml over a network page.

Chaos Licensing Setup for Large Studio Office

In a larger office or studio where there are many workstations and a render farm with multiple render nodes, install the license server on the network with a redundancy as discussed here. In other words, the license server is installed on 2-3 machines on the network which are all activated by the same user account. All of the workstations in that office will need their license settings configured to use the IP addresses of those 2-3 license server machines as their primary and alternate server(s), as discussed in the following section: Setting up multiple license servers for redundancy.

Chaos Licensing Setup for Multiple Regional/Global Locations

In offices or studios with multiple regional or even global locations, install up to three license servers for each location, all activated on the same account. This way, each office will have a local redundancy. All the workstations in that local office would have their license settings configured to use the IP addresses of those 2-3 local license server machines as their primary and alternate server(s).

Note that installing a license server for one location in a remote location may lead to connection issues when obtaining a license.