Cisco Smart Licensing Policy

Cisco NX-OS Smart Licensing Policy

Cisco has moved towards a smart Licensing model starting from NX-OS 10.2(1) release. In this, Cisco follows Smart Licensing along with Policy (SLP), which simplifies License activation, Mobility, Visibility, and deployments.

In the Traditional Method, we use PAK kay to generate the Licenses, and these PAK are mapped to Device device-specific serial number. Also, the network operator must know each device's capability in advance and its specific licensing requirements to generate the License from PAK.

Also, if the License has to be moved from one device to another, New License files have to be generated. The customer has to install these licenses manually on each device and keep monitoring and making inventory manually.

To overcome this, Cisco introduced the concept of Smart License in 2020 in NX-OS 9.3(3), which has very much improved Customer Experience.

Smart Licensing with Policy it supports a variety of deployment modes and has eliminated product registration and evaluation mode.

Smart Licensing with policy establishes a pool of License entitlements, in which customers can now

• Consume Entitlements across their entire organization
• Add Entitlements during purchase to their smart account in Cisco Smart Software Manager.
• Provides flexibility to turn ON any feature on any device, whenever they want.
• Report License consumption to CCSM by the device

Customers without a Smart account can easily register to https://software.cisco.com/. Existing PAK licenses can be converted to Smart entitlements in CSSM as well.

On NX-OS, SLP can be configured so that it can directly report to the Cisco Smart Software manager (CSSM) via the Internet. Or via mediated access through Cisco Smart License Utility (CSLU) or Smart Software Manager (SSM) On-Prem.

figure below shows Smart Licensing using Policy Deployment Options

SLP provides information like how often license consumption should be reported. When the Policy is configured on the Device, it controls the first time report of License consumption ( default 90 days ), reporting frequency ( Once a year )

As we all know that NX-OS licenses are honor-based, and even if the device does not report its consumption to Cisco or the license expires, Device functionality will not be affected, and all features will operate optimally.

For existing NX-OS Customers, when a device with PAK is upgraded to NX-OS 10.2(1), the Software recognizes the PAK and automatically triggers “device led License Conversion “ to SLP.

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