Disabling unused hostid lookup and virtualization detection

Summary

Question

If you want to improve performance, how would you go about disabling unused hostid lookups and virtualization detection?

For example, I find that the GetFeatureCollection(LicenseSourceOption.TrustedStorage) call takes too much time.

Answer

The FNE 2017 R2 release notes include the following notes on hostid filtering and caching:

"By design, whenever a FlexNet Embedded API or method requests the retrieval of hostids on a client device, native libraries attempt to retrieve all available hostids on the device. This detection can take considerable time and cause problems with detection libraries used by certain dongles.

The new Identity Update utility (identityupdateutil) sets up filtering and caching parameters for use during hostid detection on a FlexNet Embedded client device. This configuration is injected into the binary containing the identity data for your FlexNet Embedded client applications and is retrieved whenever a FlexNet Embedded API or method, such as getHostids, is called to detect available hostids on the client device. The configuration helps to reduce hostid retrieval time by limiting the detection process to specific hostid types and (optionally) by caching retrieved hostids for future hostid-detection calls.

This utility supports the configuration of client identities for applications that you create with the FlexNet Embedded C XT, .NET XT, or Java XT SDK. It does not support the configuration of client identities for applications created with the FlexNet Embedded C SDK; nor does it support the configuration of a FlexNet Embedded license server identity."

Regarding disabling virtualization detection, it depends on the specific kit. For example, the C XT User Guide includes information on "Detecting a Virtualized Environment." Please note that most of the API references also have a pdf format that can be quickly searched for your convenience. The following are the APIs in question that you'd set to disable VM detection for the various kits.

Java-XT:
ILicenseManager.enableVirtualMachineDetection(false);

C-XT:
FlcSetVmDetectionEnabled(?);

.NET-XT:
ILicensing.LicenseManager.VMDetectionEnabled = false;

C-SDK:
Link in no-op implementation of the VM detection callout

Server:
Set licensing.disableVirtualMachineCheck in producer-settings.xml

Additional Information

The alternative mechanism is to use the identityupdateutil utility as detailed in the FNE R3 XT kit guides which also enabled a number of other low level tweaks to how the XT kits work.

Disabling unused hostid lookup and virtualization detection