CA Harvest license query
Article ID: 228656
Updated On:
Products
Issue/Introduction
We have questions about Harvest licenses work.
Environment
CA Harvest SCM v13.0.3 and up
Resolution
Questions and answers:
1. How do we find out the total number of licenses available in Harvest.
>> The total number of licenses can be found on your sales contract. There is a setting in your HBroker.arg file on the broker machine called "-maxserver=" that determines the maximum number of hserver processes that can be running at any time. An hserver process exists to fulfill a request coming from a client. You will generally have one hserver process for each client connection, so this "-maxserver=" setting would indicate the maximum number of users that can be connected to Harvest at any particular time.
Note: When modifying the maxserver settings, the broker will need to be restarted for the changes to take effect.
2. Is it a per-user license or a floating license.
>> Harvest will keep track of the number of concurrent connections without any concern for who is creating those connections. This is described as a concurrent license or a "floating" license. Only users who have been registered in the Harvest system (have a valid Harvest userid) have permission to log in, but "-maxserver=" corresponds to the number of connections, not the number of users registered in the system. You can have more users registered in the Harvest system than are actually logged in at any particular time.
3. How is a license assigned to a user when he/she is logged in to Harvest.
>> When a user logs in he/she will occupy a connection. After logging off, that connection is freed up and can then be occupied by another user.
4. If an organization has 100 users who will be using harvest, what is the license recommendation (how many licenses should be purchased in order to access the application without any interruption).
>> The best thing here would be to estimate how many users would need to be logged into Harvest at the busiest time. Can you think of a scenario when all 100 would be trying to use Harvest at the same time? If so, 100 would be your answer. This is where knowledge of your users and how they work would be the deciding factor. Also consider any possible growth in your Harvest user community that might happen during your contract period. Are there other development teams that might be interested in using Harvest that are not using it today?
5. Does the "-maxserver=" setting in the HBroker.arg file need to be adjusted according to the number of licenses or if this setting is higher, will it restrict the number of connections to the number of licenses?
>> Yes, you should update your HBroker.arg file so that "-maxserver=" reflects the number of licenses on your contract.
6. Is each hserver process equal to a user connection?
>> It’s a little complicated but that is the basic idea.
7. How do the licenses relate to hserver processes?
>> The way it works is that when the user performs an action in Workbench, for example, creating a package or checking out a file, Harvest has a list of tasks to complete in order to fulfill that request. The SCM Workbench sends the "to-do" list to the SCM Broker and the broker will then find an hserver process (sometimes more than one if more hservers are available) in order to complete all the tasks and return the result to the user.
Something else to know is that no user that has logged in to Harvest keeps an on-going connection with the SCM Broker, so each request opens a fresh connection, the work is done, the result is returned and the connection is closed.
8. Can we get the usage of all the users logged in for a particular month. We would like to check how many users are actively using the application.
>> There are two ways to answer this question.
- We have a command-line utility called "hgetusg" that can report how many connections are currently active and how many were active at the busiest time. Here's where you can read more about this command: hgetusg Command-Get Usage
- If your question is how many users (or which users) have recently logged into harvest, without respect to whether they are connected right now, an SQL query can answer that for you. Here is an example that shows the most recent login date for each user (for an Oracle database):
SELECT USERNAME, LOGINDATE FROM HARUSER WHERE LOGINDATE > (SYSDATE-30)
9. Is a license required for each client installation?
>> No. Only the SCM Server side requires a license.
Additional Information
Starting with SCM version 14, the license file is no longer required.
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