Network Licenses in a Mixed Network Environment

Dynamic licensing

Dynamic licensing is a feature of Autodesk Inventor products. Its purpose is to consume a higher value Inventor license only when a command for the higher value Inventor license is invoked. Dynamic Licensing gives all users access to any level of functionality on an as needed basis.

Important: Dynamic licensing is only available for network licensing users who have the higher-level functionality installed. We recommend that you install Autodesk Inventor Professional 2017 on all seats.

The license managers understand there is a product hierarchy. When a user accesses one of the products, the lowest available appropriate license is consumed. Each time a user exits an Inventor products, the license for that product is released. Inventor dynamically moves up to a higher license when a user clicks a command or enters an environment that requires a higher level license than is currently active.

Licenses for Autodesk Inventor that Run on Client Workstations

Dynamic licensing example

Consider the following example: You have 2 Inventor Professional 2017 licenses and 2 Inventor 2017 licenses on your network. When the first user starts Inventor Professional 2017, the license manager will use the Inventor 2017 license. If a second user starts Inventor Professional 2017, the other Inventor 2017 license will be used. If one of the users invokes an Inventor Professional 2017 command, then an Inventor Professional 2017 license will be consumed and an Inventor 2017 license will become available.

Dynamic licensing best practices

If you know in advance that a specific user needs access to one specific application (for example, Autodesk Inventor) then you install only that application on the user's computer. The installation participates in the complete license pool.

If different people need access to different Inventor products at different times, install the highest value product on all workstations. Although this installation is recommended, it is not required.

Licenses are returned to the license pool when the user closes the application. Instruct users to close Inventor when they are finished using it so that someone else can take advantage of the license or configure the server to reclaim the idle client licenses.

For more information, and a good overview of the behavior in 2017 products and suites, refer to Network License Administration.