CUBE Enforced Licensing

[TONY SMITH]

Hi,

At the moment we don't have any installations using CUBE Smart Licensing, they all use the older trust based licensing where there's basically no enforcement at all.  However a few installs are on ISR4xxx routers and I understand that at some point following an IOS upgrade these will move to Smart Licensing.   I have a couple of questions ..

(1) Will the licensing be enforced, and if how does the per session enforcement work, does it return Busy or similar if calls exceed the licensed limit?  Is there a specific configuration that sets an overall session limit?

(2) Depending on the answer above, if it's enforced per session then how do you assign specific session counts from the SA to the actual device?

Thanks, Tony S

[Chris Deren]

Theoretically you are supposed to be already applying "mode border-element license capacity" which limits the number of calls on CUBE to what you are licensed for. With smart licensing this is deprecated as the license sync with be done with Smart licensing per:

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/ios-xml/ios/voice/cube/configuration/cube-book/voi-cube-overview.html

Enables Cisco UBE configuration and configures the number of licenses (capacity).

• Effective from Cisco IOS XE Amsterdam 17.2.1r, the capacity keyword and sessions argument are deprecated. However, the keyword and argument are available in the Command Line Interface (CLI). If you try to configure license capacity using CLI, the following error message is displayed:

  Error: CUBE SIP trunk licensing is now based on dynamic session counting. Static license capacity configuration has been deprecated.

• Effective from Cisco IOS XE Amsterdam 17.2.1r, the periodicity keyword and [mins | hours| days] argument are introduced. The periodicity keyword configures periodicity interval for license entitlement requests for Cisco UBE. If you do not configure license periodicity, the default license period of 7 days is enabled.

  Note

  We recommend you to configure interval in days. Configuring interval in minutes or hours increases the frequency of entitlement requests and thereby increases the processing load on Cisco Smart Software Manager (CSSM). License periodicity configuration of minutes or hours is recommended to be used only with Cisco Smart Software Manager On-Prem (formerly known as Cisco Smart Software Manager satellite) mode.

[TONY SMITH]

Thanks, that's interesting.  To my mind it would have been better to keep that capacity configuration in place, rather than letting different CUBEs fight it out for the contents of the licence inventory in the SA.  From what I can see the CUBEs help themselves based on their peak count during the period configured.  I can't see anywhere how licence counts are "given back" if that peak was an anomaly. 

As it happens I almost always configure my CUBEs with two-way dial peers, rather than separate in and out, so I can configure maximum connections to set a hard limit.  But for more complex configurations that can't be done.

[Anthony Holloway]

I have never seen the legacy capacity command limit the calls on CUBE. Are you certain about this? Have you experienced it yourself? Maybe I am not recalling correctly though. Very possible.

[Chris Deren]

I assumed the command does what it states it does, but admittedly I never really tested it out, so cannot say for sure :)

[TONY SMITH]

I'm not even sure what functions "mode border-element" actually enables.  I've seen working CUBEs without that configuration at all.

I'm going to see if I can test that capacity feature on our own install.

[TONY SMITH]

Quick test I set " mode border-element license capacity 1", but I was able to make four concurrent outbound calls.  So based on that test, on that particular platform/version, it looks like it is not enforced.  Unless it needs a reload to come into effect, in which case it won't be so easy to test.

[andrewchyun]

Tony, what version were you running when you did this test? 

[Roger Kallberg]

We did use that command on 17.4.3, but has since upgraded to 17.6.4 due to a series of service affecting defects and on that version the command is deprecated. @TONY SMITH is correct, there is no enforcement of this.

[Anthony Holloway]

I *think* it's the only way to create a Local Transcoding Interface. But you're right, just creating some dial-peers (which is all CUBE really is) does not require that command.