Golden Software concurrent-use licenses do permit virtual machines to be used as the license server. The installation of the license manager and the license administrator are the same. See this article for license server software installation instructions.

There are, however, some additional things to consider.

System requirements:

• See this article for OS and server hardware requirements: What are the system requirements for setting up a license server?
• The license manager and license administrator can run with VMware ESX/Workstation, VirtualBox, Hyper-V, Xen, and XenServer.
• The license manager and license administrator can be run on cloud-based virtual machines such as Amazon Web Services EC2 or Microsoft Azure, and a private VPN connection.
• The guest operating system should be Windows Server 2008 or newer, or Windows 7 or newer.
• The client PCs running the software must be able to reach the license manager running on the license server using UDP port 5093. That port must be open both in the Windows OS as well as any VM or Instance firewalls.

Moving a license server VM:

When you activate a concurrent-use license on the license server, the activation is "locked", meaning that the activation is tied to the hardware.  By default, the activation is locked to the MAC Address, Windows UUID, and the Processor ID.

If you move this VM from one physical host server to a different physical host server, it is possible that one of the locking criteria will change which will result in that license activation no longer being valid.  The end-user client software will display an warning "Failed to retrieve license due to client/server locking code mismatch."

If you want to move your license server from one physical server to another, use the License Administrator to deactivate the license before moving your license server VM to a different physical server. Then you can activate the license on the VM on the new physical server.

If you are using a more complex VM environment that includes clustering or load sharing, like an VMware ESX Server group, we recommend that you contact Golden Software Support. We can create a custom license that uses different hardware locking criteria so that the license will still be valid after an automatic move of your license server VM to a different physical server.  Please let us know which of the three hardware locking criteria you expect will change in your VM environment.

See also:

• What are the system requirements for setting up a license server?
• How Do I Set Up My License Server For Strater, Surfer And Grapher?

Updated February 2022