Dassault Systèmes introduced a new licensing server a while ago to support licenses of all its products including SIMULIA. The server is called as Dassault Systèmes license server or DSLS. This article highlights the various installation and license management aspects of DSLS with specific focus on SIMULIA products on DSLS. It’s worthy to mention here that SIMULIA’s native FlexLM license server is still compatible with all SIMULIA products and releases and this compatibility is likely to continue in future as well.

The installation media: The best location to find latest version of DSLS media along with installation guide is the following: http://www.3ds.com/support/download/overview/

As of March 2016, the latest version of DSLS is version 6.418.2 that supports all versions of SIMULIA 2016 line of products as well as other versions of Abaqus as old as Abaqus 6.12. The media provides options to install DSLS either as a license server or as a license management tool.

The server target ID: The FlexLM license server requires physical address of Ethernet Adapter local area connection, which is usually a 12 digit numerical string such as 5S-26-0A-3W-87-0C. The DSLS target ID extraction is quite different. The media contains an executable called DSLicTarget.exe that should be launched to get the DSLS target ID for a given server. The syntax of DSLS target ID is usually a three digit character followed by a long numeric number such as CAT-427B18A3C4168A67.

The visual look of DSLS: Shown below are three visual images of the DSLS once it is installed and launched.

When DSLS is installed but server is not started

When server is started but licenses are not enrolled

When server is started and licenses are enrolled

The license administration tab of DSLS provides information such as server name, license type, name of trigrams enrolled along with quantity, etc. The license usage tab provides information about license enrolled vs. license usage for all the enrolled trigrams.

DSLS token count: The scale factor between FlexLM token count and DSLS token count is 1:10. This means that any token-based SIMULIA feature that consumes X flexLM based license tokens will consume 10X DSLS based license tokens.

Do you need to worry about how many DSLS tokens you need to order?

The answer is NO. When you migrate from FlexLM to DSLS, the license processing system takes care of this scale internally. You just need to place the order as per FlexLM token consumption requirements. It’s worth mentioning that products and trigrams do not change their names when the license is migrated from FlexLM to DSLS.

Example: An Abaqus analysis pack (QAP trigram) in the FlexLM licensing scheme is still called Abaqus analysis pack (QAP trigram) in the DSLS licensing scheme. What really changes is the number of tokens as per scale. While a QAP on FlexLM license contains 1 concurrent seat of user interface and 5 FlexLM based Abaqus tokens, a QAP on DSLS license contains 1 concurrent seat of user interface and 50 DSLS based Abaqus tokens. That still means that only a single one core job of Abaqus can be submitted using QAP as on DSLS server, a single one core job consumes 50 DSLS tokens.

The scale of 10 provides a smoother variation of number of cores vs. token consumption in DSLS licensing system as compared to FlexLM licensing system.

 

What’s supported and what’s not: DSLS compatibility with SIMULIA products was introduced in 2012 and since then this compatibility has grown stronger. The image below shows compatibility of DSLS with various SIMULIA products over time (releases). It’s worth mentioning that Fe-Safe is now a part of extended tokens that are supported on DSLS. So although standalone Fe-Safe is not supported on DSLS, it is still possible to use Fe-Safe on DSLS through extended tokens.