Understanding Cascade Licensing for Autodesk Products

Issue

You would like to understand more about Cascade Licensing and how it affects license consumption in your pool of available Autodesk product licenses.

Solution

Cascade Licensing is implemented for mixed-product environments where a single license manager is servicing multiple Autodesk products. Cascade Licensing allows an Autodesk product to obtain a license that belongs to another Autodesk product in the same license pool. With Cascade Licensing, lower ranking product licenses can be used before higher ranking product licenses; when all lower ranking product licenses are in use, a product will cascade up to use the license of a higher ranking product.

The ranking of a product is determined by its place in the cascading sequence for a given product. Cascading sequences—the order in which one product cascades to another—is pre-determined by individual product groups at Autodesk and cannot be changed or configured. Cascading sequences for recent Autodesk product releases can be viewed at the following technical solutions:

• 2013: Cascading Sequences for Autodesk Products
• 2012: Cascading Sequences for Autodesk Products
• 2011: Cascading Sequences for Autodesk Products
• 2010: Cascading Sequences for Autodesk Products

When possible, licenses are shared to minimize total license usage however the order in which products are launched affects the way licenses are initially allocated.

Example #1: Mixed pool of Point product and Suite product licenses

A customer has two AutoCAD licenses, one Revit Architecture license, and one Revit Architecture Suite license, for a total of four licenses.

• User A runs AutoCAD and pulls one AutoCAD license.
• User A then runs Revit Architecture, pulling the one Revit Architecture license. At this point, User A has consumed two licenses on his machine.
• User B runs AutoCAD and pulls the remaining AutoCAD license.
• User B then runs Revit Architecture and, since the sole Revit Architecture license is already in use, it cascades up and uses the Revit Architecture Suite license. At this point, User B has consumed two licenses and all available licenses are in use.

Lesson: When a user starts a Point product, the Point product license will be checked out, if available. If there are no available Point product licenses, a Suite license will be checked out instead.

• Within a couple minutes, the Cascade Licensing logic detects the Suite license and returns the AutoCAD license to the pool leaving User B as having consumed only one license on his machine.

Lesson: Once there is a Suite license on the users machine, any lower ranking product licenses will automatically be returned.

Example #2: Mixed pool of Point product and Suite product licenses

A customer has one AutoCAD 2012 license, and one Autodesk Design Suite Premium 2012 license, for a total of two licenses.

• A user runs AutoCAD and pulls the one AutoCAD license.
• The same user then runs Autodesk Showcase, pulling the one Design Suite Premium license. Because both products are part of Autodesk Design Suite Premium, AutoCAD switches over to using the Design Suite Premium license. The AutoCAD license is returned to the pool and is available for another user.
• The user then starts Autodesk 3ds Max Design on the same machine. Since Autodesk 3ds Max Design is also part of the Autodesk Design Suite Premium, it also uses the Design Suite Premium license. No new license is required and it shares the license with AutoCAD and Autodesk Showcase. There is still an AutoCAD license available in the pool.

Lesson: All products included in a Suite can run using a single Suite license on the same machine.

Example #3: Mixed pool of Suite product licenses

A customer has 10 Autodesk Design Suite Premium licenses, one Autodesk Design Suite Ultimate license, and two Autodesk Building Design Suite Ultimate licences, for a total of 13 licenses.

• 11 users launch 3ds Max Design simultaneously. The first 10 users consume all the Design Suite Premium licenses; the 11th user takes the sole Design Suite Ultimate license.
• Two more users launch 3ds Max Design, for a total of 13 licenses needed. These two users consume the two Building Design Suite Ultimate licenses. At this point, all 13 licenses are in use.

Lesson: If multiple suite licenses on a server share a common product—in this case, Autodesk 3ds Max Design—the first license that will be used will be the one listed first (lowest ranking) in the cascading sequence. When those licenses are all consumed, cascading will move to the next highest ranking product available in the license pool. For example, the cascading sequence for 3ds Max Design includes the following order of products:

Autodesk 3ds Max Design 2012
Autodesk Design Suite Premium 2012
Autodesk Product Design Suite Premium 2012
Autodesk Factory Design Suite Premium 2012
Autodesk Building Design Suite Premium 2012
Autodesk Infrastructure Design Suite Premium 2012
Autodesk Design Suite Ultimate 2012
Autodesk Product Design Suite Ultimate 2012
Autodesk Factory Design Suite Ultimate 2012
Autodesk Building Design Suite Ultimate 2012
…

More Information

• Licensing Cascading Behavior of Autodesk Manufacturing Products and Suites
• Manually configuring the Cascading License Priority List (PLIST)
• Corrupt CascadeInfo.cas file results in failure of cascading functionality
• How to understand and manage your Autodesk licenses (video)