Check available number of licenses

[saitade-bh]

Is there any existing method to get the available number of licenses for a particular license type? For example, something like check_available_licenses("meba") to get back the number of meba licences available to use?

[germa89]

Hi @saitade-bh

I am afraid we have no pythonic method to know that... at least not with PyMAPDL.

@RobPasMue I guess there is not such capability within PyAnsys ecosystem, am I right? I am aware though that there are discussions in this direction.
@MaxJPRey @koubaa for awareness.

[RobPasMue]

Nope not yet - there have been various requests in that direction but nothing done yet. We need to get in touch with the licensing team for planning this work.

[mikerife]

@saitade-bh @germa89 @RobPasMue
Hi All - hope I don't open Pandoras Box here but from the standard Ansys installation we can use lmutil to do this. Assuming a MS Win OS the command would be:
"C:\Program Files\ANSYS Inc\v242\licensingclient\winx64\lmutil.exe" lmstat -f meba -c [email protected]

You would replace 127.0.0.1 with the hostname or IP address of the license server. This could be found in the C:\Program Files\ANSYS Inc\Shared Files\Licensing\ansyslmd.ini file.

You would have to parse out the output to get the number available (the command gives more than a simple number). And I've no idea how to issue from Python (was playing around with the subprocess library but did not quite get it to work). But maybe this is enough of a starting point.

A word of caution - if you do create something please, please build in a wait/pause feature. We don't want to be pinging the license server with thousands of requests per minute/second/whatever. That way lies a denial-of-service attack. If you are laughing this advice off it comes from real world direct technical support experience.

lmstat is getting the license information from the license server without regard to the license options file, if one exists. The option file rules only kick in on check-out...at least that is my understanding.

lmutil is a FlexNet application (licensing), not Ansys Inc.

Mike

[germa89]

This is going to be suuuuper helpful in the future :) ... Thank you @mikerife

[germa89]

Any comment on how that compares to the current implementation using ansysli_util ??

pymapdl/src/ansys/mapdl/core/licensing.py

Lines 337 to 345 in 64b0dda

	process = subprocess.Popen(
	f'"{ansysli_util_path}" -checkout {lic}',
	stdout=subprocess.PIPE,
	stderr=subprocess.STDOUT,
	env=env,
	shell=True,
	)
	output = process.stdout.read().decode()

[mikerife]

@germa89 well the obvious answer is that the ansysli_util checkout is actually checking out the license which is then immediately checked back in. While the lmstat is just getting the status of the used and total number of licenses available (no check outs). I'd say each has its place. When troubleshooting we use the ansysli checkout to actually test checking out a license instead of having to start some product that would take the license. Much easier! Way back when (in another life where licensing support was a part of daily life) the lmstat would be used to see if the license configuration was ok, then a checkout to see if the options file was working right.

The ansysli checkout does get recorded in the Flex log...a license admin may not want a ton of 1 second check out/in cluttering up their log. Or they may not care.

[saitade-bh]

I was able to get away with this in Python. Thanks a ton Mike!

import subprocess
import re

lic_type = input("Enter the licence to check: ")
command = fr'"C:\Program Files\ANSYS Inc\v212\licensingclient\winx64\lmutil.exe" lmstat -f {lic_type} -c [email protected]'
result = subprocess.run(command, shell=True, capture_output=True, text=True)
output = result.stdout

lic_info = re.search(fr"Users of {lic_type}:\s+\(Total of (\d+) licenses issued;\s+Total of (\d+) licenses in use\)",output)
if lic_info:
    total_licenses = int(lic_info.group(1))
    licenses_in_use = int(lic_info.group(2))
    available_licenses = total_licenses- licenses_in_use
    print(f"Total Licenses Issued: {total_licenses}")
    print(f"Licenses in Use: {licenses_in_use}")
    print(f"Available Licenses: {available_licenses}")
else:
    print(f"Couldn't find the information for '{lic_type}'.")

[germa89]

Thank you @saitade-bh for sharing this!