Renewing your NVIDIA licenses on the DLS appliance

So you’ve been happily using the new Delegated License Service (which you can read about in a previous post), but the time has come to renew/update/remove/whatever the licenses you have installed. Now what? In this post, I’ll demonstrate how to update the licenses and ensure those clients stay licensed.

Getting started

Updating the License Pool requires temporarily disabling it because it cannot be edited while serving licenses. I advise you do this in a maintenance window or when most of your clients are already licensed, as there is a grace period with newer versions of the vGPU driver.

With that out of the way, I assume you already have the entitlements active in the NVIDIA Licensing Portal, which you can reach from the NVIDIA application hub.

Updating the License Server

In the NVIDIA Licensing Portal, click License Servers in the column on the left and select List Servers. Now click on the Actions button and select Manage Features from the dropdown menu. In the Manage Server Features window, click the Add new tab and search for the entitlement(s) you would like to add.

Don’t forget to scroll to the right and select the appropriate quantity in the Added column!

When you’ve selected the correct entitlements with the corresponding quantity, click Update server features. You’ll be back at the License Servers screen, where you click the Actions button again, but this time you’ll click Download.

Updating the License Pool(s)

With the License server bin file downloaded, it’s time to wrap things up at the DLS appliance!
Sign in to the administrative console of the appliance, and click on the green Actions button in the top right.

Next, select Update server from NLP, where you’ll be prompted to upload the Bin file we downloaded earlier.

From the Dashboard, click License Pools.

This is the point where you’ll shortly interrupt the servicing of licenses!

From the License Pools tab, click on the Actions button and select Disable from the dropdown menu.

A warning will confirm that no new license requests will be fulfilled when you disable the pool. To continue, click Disable Pool.

When you click on the Actions button again, you can now select Manage features. From the Add new tab, you can add the products that you’ve added from the NVIDIA Licensing Portal.

Make sure you add the correct quantity and click Update pool features when you’re done.

And that’s it! If you enable the License Pool, clients will start requesting licenses again! That wasn’t so bad now, was it?