FlexLM License Manager and IPv6 and Direct Access

Just stumbled upon a funny situation here: ArcGIS and Autocad make use of a FlexLM License Manager (LMTools) when set up in Concurrent Use Mode. As soon as you start these applications, they will try to reserve a license for as long as the application is running. This works well in a native LAN environment. In Direct Access however the routing gets confused. You probably get the following error:
“Network Licensing: Error [-15.570.0] A valid license could not be obtained by the network license manager”

Consider the following situation:
Your IT environment consists of clients which connect to your IT infrastructure from your HQ, as well as by using Direct Access from remote locations.
A laptop is configured with ArcGIS installed. The license manager is configured to use SRV-LICENSING-1 for license borrowing. When the application starts in the LAN environment, the local licensing tool tries to resolve SRV-LICENSING-1 to a valid IP address. This works OK; DNS will return 10.10.1.143, i.e.
Direct Access however only uses IPv6 as default protocol. It is unable to find IPv4 addresses. So when my licensing tool tries to connect to SRV-LICENSING-1, it will actually try to connect to 10.10.1.143, which will obviously fail. Direct Access wants an IPv6 address only.

Solution in this case:
Configure 2 licensing servers in the registry: 1 for the local network and 1 for the Direct Access network.
It is possible to configure this setting at installation by using the “ESRI_LICENSE_HOST=” parameter switch. Separate server addresses with a semi colon (;). Ie.:
ESRI_LICENSE_HOST=srv-licensing-1;fd95:a3f5:d3b8:4433:b0432:63

Another solution is to use Group Policy preferences. This is the recommended way if you already installed ArcGIS on several machines:

esri_arcgis_license_manager_direct_access

0 0 votes
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of
guest
0 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
0
Would love your thoughts, please comment.x
()
x