Question

How does the licensing work in an HA cluster? Do both nodes need a license file and what happens if one nodes does not have a license file?

Answer

When using a SECaaS license in a High Availability (HA) environment, only the active node will fetch the license and contact the CSPN (Clavister Service Provisioning Network) server. Meanwhile, the inactive node will validate its license through the active node.

This means that in an HA environment where failovers rarely or never occur, the inactive node may appear as if its license is about to expire. This happens because the inactive node does not contact the CSPN server, so its license date may not update. However, as long as the active node has a valid license installed, there will be no issues.

You can verify that the license has been validated by the active peer by running the license command in the CLI on the inactive node. You should see the line:

“Last Result: License validated by HA peer.”

If you want the inactive node to download the latest license, you can trigger a failover, making it the active node. This will switch the roles between the two nodes, allowing the new active node to download the license while the other node validates its license with the new active peer.

To summarize, when using a SECaaS license:

• Always check the license on the active node.
• If the active node has a valid license with the correct date, ensure the inactive node validates it through the active peer.
• Any outdated date on the inactive node is likely because it has not been active for a long time and has not retrieved the latest license.

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