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    Metered Licensing is new in Qube 6.9-0

    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.

    You must perform all the setup procedures outlined here in order to take advantage of metered licensing.

    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.

    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

    Metered Licensing is enabled by default on all Qube Supervisors, provided your supervisor is v6.9-0 or later

    Qube 6.9-0 is the minimum Qube version for the Metered Licensing feature, previous versions of Qube don't support this feature.

    If your supervisor is a version earlier than 6.9-0, you will have to upgrade it to take advantage of Metered Licensing.

    Optional settings

    You may throttle the number of metered licenses your supervisor will use at any one time with the supervisor_max_metered_licenses parameter.  This value is compared with the Concurrent Metered limit set on the Metered Licensing Portal, and the lower of the two values is used.

    See also

    supervisor_max_metered_licenses

    Setting up your accounts on the Metered License Server

    Login to the Metered Licensing Portal at https://metered.pipelinefx.com

    Create a user account

    Follow the link at the bottom of the login pane to create a new account.

    Icon

    Make a note of the user name and password, you'll need them for the Metered License Agent (MLA) installation.

    Once you've completed the user signup, you will receive an email with the subject line: PipelineFX metered license server: New user account activation. You must click on the link in that email to activate your user account.

    Once your user account has been activated, you'll have the option to "Create a company account" or "Join an existing Company account".  

    During the initial setup, you'll want to Create a new Billing account.

           

    • Account Name: required - this should be your company or studio name, not your user name
    • Reporting Contact: required - an email address to receive notifications, alerts, etc sent by the MLS
    • Billing Contact: optional - an email address for you monthly invoice statements.  If not defined, your invoice will be sent to the Reporting Contact.

    Add your supervisor to the billing account

     

    The MAC Address field is required, the description is optional.

    The supervisor MAC address can be found several different ways:

    • from the hostid field in your Qube License file:

      #######################################################
[license_S_6f3788f8477611e69118022eb6d22d19]
supervisor = 1 
vendor = "Pipelinefx L.L.C."
version = 6.9 
type = unlimited
software = qube
hostid = 14:10:9F:E3:70:FD
assign_date = "Jul 11, 2016"
licensee = "PFX - jburk test"
exp_date = "Jul 11, 2017"
key = 106fac098b002188176b0fb45a0ab21f
#######################################################

    • from the output of the qbping command-line utility

    supervisor - active - tag: 127.0.0.1 14:10:9F:E3:70:FD 6.9-0 rel-6.9-0001 osx -  - host - 0/10 unlimited licenses (metered=0/0) - mode=0 (0).

    • With WranglerView:
      • Show the log panel with View->Show/Hide Log Panel

      • run Administration->Ping Supervisor

        • copy & the MAC address from the bottom of the log panel

    Add a description to the new supervisor entry (optional)

    Click in the description field to add or edit easily-recognizable name for your supervisor.

    Metered License Agent Installation and Configuration

    MLA retirement plan

    The Metered License Agent is being phased out and replaced by the Data Relay Agent.

    In order to reduce the number of components installed by Qube, we're in the process of folding the MLA's license collection functionality into the (new in Qube 6.10) Data Relay Agent.  

    This table outlines the last version of Qube that still supports the MLA.   If your operating system is running a later version of Qube, please refer to the DRA Installation and Setup documentation.

    Operating SystemLast Qube Version Supporting the MLA
    Windows7.0
    OS X7.0
    Linux6.9


    Purpose of the Metered License Agent (MLA).

    The Metered License Agent (MLA) is a utility running at your facility which collects data from your supervisor and sends it to the Metered License Server (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.

    It samples the license usage from your supervisor once a minute and stores it locally in a batch.  When it accumulates at least 15 records, it will transmit the batch of records to the MLS for storage.

    Icon

    The MLA should be installed on a machine that will be running 24x7.

    Icon

    The Metered License Agent is only supported by v3.0 and later of the Qube Installer utility.

    Metered License Agent Installation Host

    The MLA can be installed on any machine in your facility which:

    • has the qube-core package installed
    • can reach the supervisor service on the supervisor host
    • can reach the public internet

    The most common installation scenarios

    • Install the MLA on your supervisor.  Your supervisor must be able to access the public internet
    • Install the MLA on another machine in your facility. A machine already running a license server is a good candidate
    • Install the MLA on a host in your firewall's DMZ.  The firewall rules can be restricted to:
      • inbound TCP port 50001 to the supervisor
      • outbound TCP port 443 on metered.pipelinefx.com

    MLA login credentials

    The MLA needs login credentials on the Metered License Server (MLS) in order to ensure that the reported data is associated with the correct Billing Account on the MLS.  The username and password you created during the PipelineFX Metered Licensing Portal Account Setup step should be used.

    MLA Installation Procedure

    On Windows and OS X hosts, we recommend using the Qube Installer to perform the MLA installation, and provide the username and password from the MLS user account.

    MLA installation from RPM on linux

    Many linux machines do not have a graphics head on them, and so installation must be done using the command line and installing directly from the RPM.  This will necessitate setting up the credentials file and cron job by hand.

    For a list of command-line arguments to the MLA, see Metered License Agent Advanced Usage.

     

     Click here to expand the manual installation details...
    Install the MLA rpm
    [root@ip-192-168-66-21 /tmp]# rpm -ivh qube-mla-6.9-2.CENTOS_6.7.x86_64.rpm
Preparing...                ########################################### [100%]
   1:qube-mla               ########################################### [100%]
[root@ip-192-168-66-21 /tmp]#
    Install the credentials into a file readable only by root

    In the following example, the credentials are stored in a file name /root/.mla_creds.  You may use any file name you wish, but this path must be matched when you setup the cron in a later step.

    [root@ip-192-168-66-21 ~]# cat /root/.mla_creds 
export PFX_MLS_USER=<your MLS user name>
export PFX_MLS_PASSWD=<your MLS password>

[root@ip-192-168-66-21 ~]# chmod 600 /root/.mla_creds
    Test the credentials

    You must source the credentials file in order to load them into the environment; the command to source will vary depending on your shell.

    sh-4.1# . /root/.mla_creds 
 
sh-4.1# /usr/local/pfx/qube/mla/mla --check-creds --debug
[2017-04-10 16:29:42] john.burk:axxxxxxf at https://mls.pipelinefx.com/api/v2/login
[2017-04-10 16:29:43] Credentials test passed.  Exiting...
    Run all the tests

    This will test:

    • MLA -> supervisor connectivtiy
    • MLS login credentials
    • Supervisor MAC address is registered on the Metered Portal.
    sh-4.1# /usr/local/pfx/qube/mla/mla --check --debug
[2017-04-10 16:33:06] Testing supervisor connectivity...
[2017-04-10 16:33:06] Qube supervisor defined in qb.conf: 192.168.66.21
[2017-04-10 16:33:06] - passed
[2017-04-10 16:33:06] Testing Metered License Server login credentials...
[2017-04-10 16:33:06] john.burk:axxxxxxf at https://mls.pipelinefx.com/api/v2/login
[2017-04-10 16:33:07] - passed
[2017-04-10 16:33:07] Testing MAC address registration and authorization...
[2017-04-10 16:33:07] - passed
[2017-04-10 16:33:07] All checks passed.  Exiting...
    Once all tests pass, setup the cron file to run the MLA every minute

    Note that the command run includes the "source" command, with the path to the credentials file.

     

    sh-4.1# ls -l /etc/cron.d/com.pipelinefx.meteredLicenseAgent.cron
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 107 Apr 10 16:40 /etc/cron.d/com.pipelinefx.meteredLicenseAgent.cron

sh-4.1# cat /etc/cron.d/com.pipelinefx.meteredLicenseAgent.cron 
MAILTO=''
* * * * *       root    . /root/.mla_creds && /usr/local/pfx/qube/mla/mla --debug --records 1
 
    Optionally restart the cron daemon

    NOTE: the cron daemon will detect changes in already existing files at the top of every minute, but will only scan the /etc/cron.d directrory for NEW files once an hour. For this reason, if you don't wish to wait for the top of the hour to begin testing the cron, you will need to restart the cron daemon to add the new file to cron immediately.

    sh-4.1# /etc/init.d/crond restart
    Check the MLA log

    verify that the MLA is correctly posting records to the Metered portal

     sh-4.1# tail /var/log/mlalog
[2017-04-10 16:41:01] Local journal not found, creating database PFX_metered.db
[2017-04-10 16:41:01] Created database PFX_metered.db
[2017-04-10 16:41:01] License data: used:0, prepaid:64, metered:0
[2017-04-10 16:41:01] Records collected so far: 1
[2017-04-10 16:41:01] john.burk:axxxxxxf at https://mls.pipelinefx.com/api/v2/login
[2017-04-10 16:41:02] POST'ing records to MLS at https://mls.pipelinefx.com/api/v2/records
[2017-04-10 16:41:02] Reporting {"insert": 1, "account": "jburk testing", "metered_key": "[metered]\nhostid = 02:EF:66:EF:90:97\nlicensee = \"jburk testing\"\nmax = 32\nexpires = \"Apr 11, 2017 00:41:02\"\nkey = 32450283602d5539f0d5f072cef69276", "update": 0, "authorized": true}
[2017-04-10 16:41:02] Removed all POST'ed records from table license_data
[2017-04-10 16:41:02] "[metered]\nhostid = 02:EF:66:EF:90:97\nlicensee = \"jburk testing\"\nmax = 32\nexpires = \"Apr 11, 2017 00:41:02\"\nkey = 32450283602d5539f0d5f072cef69276"
[2017-04-10 16:41:02] Supervisor authorized for metered licensing: true
    Clean up once the logs show that the MLA is reporting correctly

    If there are no error messages in the log file, and you see "Supervisor authorized for metered licensing: true", edit the cron and remove the --debug --records 1 arguments, so that your cron now looks like:

    sh-4.1# cat /etc/cron.d/com.pipelinefx.meteredLicenseAgent.cron 
MAILTO=''
* * * * *       root    . /root/.mla_creds && /usr/local/pfx/qube/mla/mla > /dev/null 2>&1


    Verifying the MLA Installation

    After you've installed the MLA, login to the MLS at https://metered.pipelinefx.com, and periodically check the "Status" value in the Supervisor section.  

    • a status of No Records indicates that the MLA has never reported data for this supervisor.
    • if the status is Active and remains that way for at least 20 minutes, then your MLA is properly reporting license usage data back to the MLS.
    • a Warning status indicates that the MLS has received data from your MLA, but not in the last 15 minutes.
      • This usually indicates that the initial installation of the MLA proceeded without error, but that it is not continuing to collect and report data after that time.
    • if the supervisor status continues to degrade from Warning to Critical to Disabled, then the MLA has not reported data for at least 4 or 8 hours, respectively.  In this case, you should check it the Metered License Agent is still running every minute, it's likely that the cron (linux), scheduled task (Windows), or launchd plist (OS X) doesn't have the correct credentials (user name and password).
    Icon

    Please note that if PipelineFX has determined that your account is not in good standing, we may de-authorize your metered license account.

    In this case, your supervisor(s) will enter the Disabled state within 15 minutes. Check the Metering Authorized field in the Account Details section on the MLS website.


    See Also

    Metered License Agent Advanced Usage

     

     

     

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