Overview

The release of Qube 6.9 includes a new option for expanding your render capacity, Qube Metered Licensing.  If you install the metered licensing agent and enable metered licensing for your supervisor, it will dispatch jobs to more workers than you have perpetual and subscription (prepaid) licenses. You will receive an invoice at the end of each month for that month's usage, and you're only billed for what you use, just like your utility bill.  Pay for only what you use, and pay for it at the end of the month.

The 3 components of Qube Metered Licensing:

1. Your Qube Supervisor.  It will have some amount of prepaid licenses installed; this is the total of perpetual and unexpired subscription licenses installed on the supervisor.
2. The Metered License Server (MLS), running at https://metered.pipelinefx.com  This is a secure cloud-based site where your license usage data is stored.  You may log into the MLS and view your usage stats and billing charges up to the last 15 minutes.  
3. The Metered License Agent (MLA).  This is a utility running at your facility which collects data from your supervisor and sends it to the MLS.  It may run inside your facility, on a host outside your firewall in a DMZ, or anywhere that can reach both your supervisor and the MLS on the public internet.

How it works

• We allow your supervisor to dispatch to any number of hosts, regardless of how many prepaid licenses are installed on your supervisor.
• Once a minute the Metered License Agent (MLA) queries your supervisor for how many workers it has dispatched jobs to, and how many prepaid licenses it has.
• The MLA sends the collected license usage data to the Metered License Server (MLS).  The data sent is limited to:
  • the date and time
  • your supervisor's MAC address 
  • the number of prepaid licenses
  • the number of used licenses
• The MLS sends back a license which continues to allow your supervisor to dispatch in excess of its prepaid licenses. 
• The amount of used licenses in excess of the number of prepaid licenses gives us a number of "worker-minute" licenses for every minute of every day.
• At the end of the month, we add up all the worker-minutes used for the month and will invoice you at the rate of US $0.10 per hour, with partial hours billed to the minute. 

Limits

You can set limits on your usage two different ways:

• How much: you can set a limit such that when the cost for number of worker-minutes for the current month exceeds your spend limit, the Metered License Server will send your supervisor a key that disables metered licensing; we turn it off for you when you've hit your limit.  In the first 15 minutes after midnight on the 1st of the next month, the MLS will send a key that re-enables metered licensing.
• How fast: you can set a limit on how many workers in excess of your prepaid license count the supervisor will send work to.  This metered limit can help you keep in check how fast you approach your spend limit.

Setting limits on the MLS website

At any time, you can login to your account on the MLS and adjust your spend limit and metered limit.

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Setting limits directly on your supervisor

You may throttle the number of metered licenses your supervisor will use at any one time with the supervisor_max_metered_licenses parameter.  You will need to edit the qb.conf configureation to make this change.

Getting Started with Metered Licensing

Metering on your Qube Supervisor

Setting up your accounts on the Metered License Server

Metered License Agent Installation and Configuration