In their attempt to meraki-fy the network industry, cisco introduced smart-licensing, which is actually stupid. The benefits seem like weak attempts to pull extra revenue from the small minority of customers who feel compelled to cheat. This may also destroy lab & home environments (where net engineers learn new stuff - for free - often times - on their own time - so they can recommend - to buy more cisco stuff - if the platform performs well - or not recommend cisco - if it doesn't - major hint cisco!!) NOTE: it does no good to try to license features for a lab environment, where avid proponents spend their own free time, pushing the Cisco cause. Plus in real-life, we have no staff to admin another non-essential program. In any case, can someone explain this to me. Upgraded a 3850 switch with IP services and 16.6.8 (Everest) to 16.9.5 (Fuij). Before and after is below.
What happens after 90 days? Can I just disable smart licensing? Will switch keep running ipservices through future reboots after 90 days? Will it stop functioning at ipservices? When will that happen? Will it revert to lanbase, or something like that? Is there an easy way to just make this "Smart licensing" go away?
I don't care about the CSL "benefits"; just want to avoid using CSL. There should be an option to turn this off for customers who don't perceive this as a "Smart" licensing move. Been down this road before with cisco as they made major changes to the ASA (ignoring their harbinger customers). look what happened to that market share now. I predict the same may start with the catalyst switch line.
EVEREST (no Smart Licensing):
lab-switch1#show license right-to-use
Slot# License Name Type Period left
----------------------------------------------------
1 ipservices Permanent Lifetime
1 lanbase Permanent Lifetime
----------------------------------------------------
License Level on Reboot: ipservices
FUJI (Smart Licensing):
Smart Licensing is ENABLED
Registration:
Status: UNREGISTERED
Export-Controlled Functionality: NOT ALLOWED
License Authorization:
Status: EVAL MODE
Evaluation Period Remaining: 89 days, 23 hours, 49 minutes, 46 seconds
License Usage:
License Entitlement tag Count Status
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
(C3850-48 IP Services) 1 EVAL MODE
Technology Package License Information:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Technology-package Technology-package
Current Type Next reboot
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ipservicesk9 Smart License ipservicesk9
None Subscription Smart License None Smart Licensing Status: UNREGISTERED/EVAL MODE
