Moving server license back and forth while migrating build server
adante111
Posts: 1 New member
Hello, what are peoples experience was in moving a SA server license between computers? Is this able to be done repeatedly and without any fuss (i.e. no required manual intervention from red-gate or flagging)?
On the red-gate portal under license management I can see the 'Remove' button against my license, but have yet to click it as I'm nervous it will set in chain a series of events I cannot easily undo against production infrastructure! I can see from the documentation that deactivating and reactivating it seems nominally straightforward, but am a little paranoid about what will happen if this is done regularly.
The reason I ask is because we have SA server running on our build server, and we're about to begin the process of setting up a new build server with the long term intention of migrating over. However, we're expecting this to be a long-burn process (probably months) with both of them running side by side until we get confidence it is fully up and running (*1). We anticipate (or hope) having to switch the license back and forth while we're testing things - and even once it becomes the main one, we'd like the option to switch back to old one in case there are capabilities we overlooked in the migration (which is likely)
So my question is per first paragraph, and if anybody has experience with this sort of process specific to SA would love to hear it.
Thanks for your time!
(*1 variety of reasons - it'll be an auxiliary task for one of our devs, our build server/process is complex (said everybody ever!) and also there are digicert EV dongles to deal with).
On the red-gate portal under license management I can see the 'Remove' button against my license, but have yet to click it as I'm nervous it will set in chain a series of events I cannot easily undo against production infrastructure! I can see from the documentation that deactivating and reactivating it seems nominally straightforward, but am a little paranoid about what will happen if this is done regularly.
The reason I ask is because we have SA server running on our build server, and we're about to begin the process of setting up a new build server with the long term intention of migrating over. However, we're expecting this to be a long-burn process (probably months) with both of them running side by side until we get confidence it is fully up and running (*1). We anticipate (or hope) having to switch the license back and forth while we're testing things - and even once it becomes the main one, we'd like the option to switch back to old one in case there are capabilities we overlooked in the migration (which is likely)
So my question is per first paragraph, and if anybody has experience with this sort of process specific to SA would love to hear it.
Thanks for your time!
(*1 variety of reasons - it'll be an auxiliary task for one of our devs, our build server/process is complex (said everybody ever!) and also there are digicert EV dongles to deal with).
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Answers
Hi adante111,
From Smart Assembly version 7 and onwards, you can programmatically license and unlicensed the tooling on demand.
An example of this can be seen here were we guide people on how to set up a Azure pipeline and dynamically license and unlicense the product.
https://documentation.red-gate.com/sa/building-your-assembly/using-smartassembly-with-azure-pipelines
Not only are you entirely welcome to move them around, we anticipate people doing so, they are you licenses, please use them as you see fit.
If you wish to check the licensing conditions you can do so here https://www.red-gate.com/support/license/
The only enforced element is that you don't go over your license allocation, but as long as you are unlicensing your build servers before licensing new ones that shouldn't be an issue.
Should you have a large number of licenses, the portal that you highlighted is likely the easiest way to achieve centralised management.
If it would give you peace of mind, I'd be happy to sent you a trial license key that you could activate and deactivate at your leisure without any impact to your existing pipeline.