How can we protect Flexera Licensed software from being copied in virtual environments?

[#1]

Summary

How can we protect Flexera Licensed software from being copied in virtual environments?

Synopsis

A customer raised a question about virtual machine cloning:-

1) Should Flexera licensed software on a machine with an activated license work after being cloned?
2) If so, how do we prevent it from working? Have we done something we shouldn't have with our implementation?
3) Do you have a best practice to protect our software from being copied in virtual environments?

Discussion

Flexera licensed software on a Virtual Machine with an activated license can be prevented from running after cloning by using VMID Trusted Storage Binding. Binding is used to lock license rights to a system and prevent them being transferred illegally to another system. Binding is implemented by storing system information (called binding identities) in trusted storage. Each time trusted storage is accessed, these binding identities are checked and compared with the values held in trusted storage.

Trusted Configuration can define settings for binding.

In addition the latest releases of FlexNet Publisher now have the ability to bind to the Generation ID of a Windows machine for supported Hyper Visors. This allows greater flexibility when required and helps to prevent cloning.

Please refer to Programming Reference Guide for Trusted Storage-Based Licensing for more details on Binding. ( page no:63 and page no:292 about how to bind to VMID) .