Cisco Smart Accounts and Smart Software Licensing Tour

hello my name is Tim Knapp and I'm part of Cisco's engineering licensing office today we're going to give you a quick walkthrough of Cisco spark software licensing and some of the things you can do like create virtual accounts add new users view your agreements or even register a product Cisco Software central is the primary location for managing your licenses the URL is very easy to remember it's software dot cisco.com after logging in you'll notice your user ID and the smart account that you're assigned to is in the upper right hand corner this page allows you to manage all of your Cisco software including downloads and upgrades placing orders managing your licenses or even administering your smart account you can navigate this page by clicking on the links or on the top there's also a very handy navigation bar let's start off with managing the smart account you'll notice tabs across the top that show details about your smart account virtual account users account agreements and even the event log let's start off with creating a virtual account after selecting new virtual account you can give the virtual account a name just by typing it in here we'll do one called smart licensing and a description is optional but it's effective to help understand what the virtual account is for you can also choose to make the virtual account a default in other words when licenses are purchased they'll be added to that account first virtual accounts are a very simple and effective way to organize licenses within a single smart account before we continue let's take a look around at some of the other things you can do within your smart account let's start by adding a new user after entering the email address or the cisco.com ID you can click on the search button and the results will show you the person that you've selected to add to the smart account user privileges are a snap to set up you can set somebody up as a smart account user or as a smart account administrator a smart account approver or you can also mix and match different types of roles within the smart account for example let's set up a user to be an administrator on one virtual account and a user on a completely different virtual account each of the roles will be defined for the virtual account and available when the person logs in next any of the smart account agreements are easily visible under the account agreements tab an event log is helpful for understanding actions that were performed within the smart account for example the new virtual account that we just added now that you're familiar with some of the basic elements of a smart account let's go back to software central and take a look at the Cisco smart software manager the Cisco smart software manager is the primary location for managing your Cisco smart software licenses after logging in the default tab is the alerts tab and it's very handy for keeping you up to date on everything that's happening with your licenses and they're categorized by major or minor alerts a good example of a major alert would be an insufficient license and an example of a minor alert might be licenses that are getting ready to expire the other tabs on this page will allow you to view your inventory of licenses do things like convert licenses run reports set up email notifications view a satellite status or even check your activity log okay so let's continue with what we set out to do and that's register a product after selecting the inventory tab will now see the virtual account that we set up called Smart Licensing is now listed with the other virtual accounts that exist within our smart account these are the primary tabs that we'll be using the general tab or we can create product instance registration tokens we'll come back to that in a second any of the licenses that we own within that virtual account would typically be visible here right now we don't have any any registered products will show up under the product instances tab and an event log is handy at keeping track of all the things that happen along the way first we'll need a registration token for the product and a registration token is an alphanumeric string that's used once during the registration process and it helps a product to associate with a specific virtual account after giving it a name reading through the Terms and responsibilities we can accept the agreements and also note that export compliance is turned on by default after creating the token a dialogue will appear in the bottom right hand corner indicating that the token has been set up and here's exactly what it looks like it's an alphanumeric string I'm going to select that and do a ctrl C to copy it to the clipboard we'll need that when we're registering the product the token ID can be used to register as many products as you want and that's what makes this very powerful because you can script it you can take that token ID and register one product or register all the products in your network okay so let's configure and register a CSR some products have Cisco smart software licensing turned on by default the CSR you have to enable it so after doing a show license all we can see our license store indicates primary license storage this means it's doing PAC based licenses so let's turn on Cisco smart software licensing it all starts here with one simple global command license smart enable let's turn on Terminal monitor so we can monitor some of the events that are happening along the way let's have another look at the show license all output it now tells us that smart licensing is turned on our status is unregistered meaning that we've turned on smart licensing but we haven't registered the product and as a result we're not consuming any licenses at this point do you remember that token ID we just created and copied to the clipboard well this is where we need it licensed smart register ID token is the command to register the product and then we'll take that token ID and paste it directly into the CLI followed by the Enter key now let's follow along with the terminal monitor to see what happens you first note that export control functionality is turned on we did that when we created the token you'll also notice the registration with Cisco licensing cloud was successful that means it was able to connect and then you'll see some alerts at the very bottom in our example here we're receiving these out of compliance messages to indicate that we don't have any licenses in our virtual account but that's ok we're gonna transfer some in just a second notice that the show license all output tells us that we're registered with the Cisco live smart account and more specifically with the smart licensing virtual account here's our out of compliance message because we're currently consuming a 50 megabyte security license on this CSR let's take a look at what's changed on the portal the license tab now indicates we have a CSR security 50 Meg license we don't have any in the queue but we're using one as a result there's a shortage and an alert indicates insufficient licenses in order to take care of the shortage let's transfer a license from another virtual account this is just like moving money from your checking account to your savings account I'm choosing the default virtual account as the account I want to take it from and I just want to take one license to offset this balance after clicking on complete transfer the dialog in the bottom right hand corner shows us that the license was successfully transferred I have one in the queue I'm using one license and as a result I no longer have that shortage so at this point we're technically done but since I have your attention let's take a look around at some of the other features of Cisco smart software licensing the product instance tab shows a registered product now called CSR demo and by looking at the serial number we can see this ends in n0l II and so does the CSR on the right-hand side so that's how we know that's the product that we just registered okay so let's take a look at the event log and see what transpired along the way we created a new token we registered a product instance we reported a shortage of a security license that we were consuming and that shortage was corrected when we transferred the license from our default virtual account into the virtual account that we set up a little bit ago now imagine all of the licenses you have within your network the license report is a very fast and effective way to view every single smart license that you own and more specifically it'll show you exactly how you're using them these reports can be exported also which makes it really easy to look at them in a spreadsheet format but let's go ahead and scroll down through all of the licenses that we have here and find the virtual account that we set up a little bit ago and voila here's the virtual account that we configured a little bit ago and the 50 megabytes security license that we're consuming on the csr want to know when your licenses are expiring well check the expiration date at the very bottom of the report and that'll keep you up to date with any term based licenses the email notification is a really effective way of keeping up-to-date on what's happening you can elect to receive daily event summaries on anything from insufficient licenses to product instances that fail to connect as well as new license that were placed into the smart account and even statuses on your satellites any satellites that you have within the network that have been configured to communicate with the Cisco smart software manager are visible under the satellite tab and it also keeps track of any synchronization issues or other alerts that you need to be aware of the activity log is really great for keeping track of your licenses it'll show you all the transactions for example the transaction date the SKU the type of license if there's an expiration on that license the virtual account that it exists in and the source so if this were entered by a sales order number it would be listed right here let's take one last look at the event log and everything we've learned along the way we've taken a new product we created a new token we registered that product we consumed a license we saw that there was a shortage and now we know how to transfer a license from one virtual account to another this completes our tour and demonstration of how cisco is making your licensing experience easier remember a cisco software central software dot cisco.com book market today

Channel: Cisco Smart Software Licensing

Views: 34,661

Keywords: cisco smart accounts smart software licensing software

Id: 7oTh4RPWBsM

Length: 12min 20sec (740 seconds)

Published: Sat May 21 2016