Master/ slave licensing enables large-scale customers to share concurrent licensing across multiple sites.
It also provides a way for large-scale hosting providers to aggregate usage information from several Softdial CallGem™ servers when such aggregation is desirable (e.g. for secure environments where the licensing master is in a DMZ).
A number of requirements must be fulfilled in order for Sytel to grant a master/ slave license. See Requirements.
How it works
- Utilisation of master/ slave licensing requires
- one or more master CallGem instances and
- one or more slave instances
Each are identified by a specific master or slave flag in the generated license. The master license contains a total agent limit value; the slave license may or (from 10.6.925) may not contain its own limit value
- The master listens for connections from slaves, logs received license-related messages in one location, and is responsible for approving or rejecting agent registrations on a slave.
- When an agent attempts registration, the slave checks to see if the local number of agents is less than the limit in its license, and if so, sends a registration request to the connected master. The master then checks whether the total number of agents across all instances is less than the limit in its license. If both of these checks are true, then the agent registration is approved. If one is false, the agent will be logged out of the slave instance, and an alert sent. See Alerts below.
- By default, the master will send a daily usage notification for all slaves to Sytel by email (see Notification Emails).
- Registry settings on the slave server define the locations of up to two masters. See Chaining. On startup, the slave will attempt to connect to the primary master; if this fails, it will attempt to connect to the secondary.
- If the slave instance loses connection to (or is never able to connect to) both master instances, agent usage will be restricted after a period. See Losing Connection.
Unlicensed Slaves
From V10.6.925 - An otherwise unlicensed installation of CallGem can attempt to connect to a master server. To allow this, on the master server, set the registry key UnlicensedSlave to 1.
If a connection can be established, the slave will allow any number of agents to be registered as long as the master approves them. This will override the local license limits so long as it is connected to a master.
This allows the provision of a single master license to a customer who can then distribute that limit across any number of slave installations without needing unique slave licenses for each one.
While ‘unlicensed’ slave usage can still be used with a licensed installation, it can not be used if either the ‘master’ or ‘slave’ flags are set in the license.
Alerts
Both Softdial License Monitor (Fig. 1) and Alert Monitor will capture and display licensing alerts. System administrators should run License Monitor against the master CallGem server. Regular alerts show slave connect and disconnect, and license counts for different types of agent.
