Q: Is smart licensing related to Cisco ONE Software?
A: Smart licensing and Cisco ONE Software are not substitutes but complements to each other. Cisco ONE Software is a choice about how the customer procures the licenses. Smart licensing is a choice about how the customer enables the licenses. For 5520, 8540 and vWLC access point licenses, procurement choices available to the customer include Cisco ONE Software SKUs, bundle SKUs, and a la carte SKUs. Procurement choice determines whether the license is portable across wireless controllers or not. For the 5520, 8540, and vWLC access point licenses, license enablement choices available to the customer include RTU and smart licensing.
Q: What is the main difference between traditional node-locked and RTU licenses and the new smart licensing?
A: The traditional node-locked and RTU licenses are tied to a serial number and reside on the wireless controller, while smart licenses reside on the cloud portal. For smart licensing, the wireless controller reports only the usage (how many access points are connected to it). Since the licenses are not tied to a serial number, they can be pooled across the same product families.
Q: Since smart licenses are tied to a customer and not to individual devices, does this mean the customer will be able to pool all their wireless controllers’ access point licenses and use them on any wireless controller?
A: No. Although with smart licensing, the licenses are not tied to a particular serial number, the smart licensing portal allows wireless access point licenses to be pooled only within the same wireless controller product families. Among the controllers that are smart license enabled, Cisco considers the 5520 and 8540 to belong to the same product family, and the vWLC to be a separate product family. So access point licenses can be pooled across all 5520 and 8540 controllers. Access point licenses can also be pooled across all vWLCs. However, 5520 and 8540 access point licenses cannot be pooled together with vWLC access point licenses.
Q: Why are there separate product family pools within smart licensing?
A: Note that the customer does not have to pay anything extra for smart licensing, and it is primarily meant to ease license management and monitoring. It is not designed to provide extra entitlement benefits. Customers wishing to port licenses across all wireless controllers should look at procuring Cisco ONE Software licenses.
Q: How does the pooling work?
A: All licenses bought by a customer for a particular wireless controller product family are pooled together. A license from the pool will be used when an access point connects to a controller that has smart licensing enabled and belongs to that product family. For example, say a customer buys 300 access point licenses for the 5520 and has three 5520 controllers (5520-1, 5520-2, and 5520-3) in the network. If 53 access points are connected to 5520-1, the available license pool in the smart portal will go down to 247 (300 – 53). These 247 licenses are available for 5520-2 and 5520-3 to use. If 5 access points are disconnected from 5520-1, 5 licenses will be returned to the pool and 252 (247 + 5) licenses will be available for 5520-2 and 5520-3 to use. If 270 access points are then connected to 5520-2, the customer will go out of compliance (using 270 licenses with only 252 available) and will be notified. The network operations, however, will not stall while the customer is out of compliance.
Q: Does the smart licensing portal distinguish between base and adder licenses?
A: No, the smart licensing portal does not distinguish between base and adder licenses.
Q: Does the smart portal support the use of Cisco ONE access point licenses that the customer gets as part of the Cisco ONE Software suite?
A: Cisco ONE Software license support is not available on the smart portal in AireOS Release 8.2.
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