The fact that each hour out of normal hours is worth about 5 hours in work time meant that we had time to look at some issues that had been hanging over our heads. Do a few installs and look at some left over servers from the virtualisation push earlier in the year.
First up was the DDM server. We thought this would be problematic as we wanted to virtualise it BUT still use the existing licenses on the server. Design Data Manager itself has its own licensing system built in using a web front end. The licenses themselves are MAC address locked. Due to the way that VMWare worked with its failover system MAC locking is problematic.
If a ESX server fails for whatever reason or is under stress VMWare has some clever load balancing available to allow the server to move (whilst staying up) to another ESX server in the cluster. As you can imagine moving the virtual server also moves the NIC that the server is running on. MAC addressing would be interesting to say the least....
We BartPE'd the server using Ghost peer-to-peer and then tried the Windows method of manually setting the MAC address in the driver of the network card:
Pulling up Pro-ENGINEER on the client didn't work, DDM ran like a charm using the same license but it appears as though FlexLM doesn't look at Windows for its information and was picking up an ESX MAC address starting 00:50:56. This code is still some ESX jiggery-pokery and not the REAL MAC address of the NICs in the server so although FlexLM ignores the windows change it couldn't get right to the hardware.
It looks as though we are going to have to get new license codes for the VM server using the ESX MAC address and then set the server so that it doesn't move. This of course has its downsides but I guess that the FlexLM software didn't want people getting free software by copying their friends MAC addresses onto their card in Windows.
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