License Management

The Schrödinger Suite installed on a Virtual Cluster needs access to a valid license. This section describes different supported configurations for installing or accessing licenses.

Note

A client system needs to be able to establish network connections on one TCP port to the license server (port 53000 is the default) for the license check-out to work.

License Server Hosted by the Virtual Cluster

The “frontend” instance of the Virtual Cluster can act as a license server for the Schrödinger Suite installation on the Virtual Cluster and any external installations, e.g., on on-premises computers. The diagram below shows this configuration.

The “frontend” instance of the Virtual Cluster can act as a license server for systems in the Virtual Cluster as well as external systems.

Installation of a license file on the “frontend” instance is as simple as executing the command:

sudo -u licserver /opt/schrodinger/licserver/bin/lictool install -k <LICENSE_KEY>

as user with “admin” authorization level (see Authorization Levels) where “<LICENSE_KEY>” is the license key provided by Schrödinger. The new license file is downloaded and placed in a directory where it is automatically recognized by the license management service (schrodinger-licserverd). After the license file has been installed successfully the commands:

sudo systemctl enable schrodinger-licserverd
sudo systemctl restart schrodinger-licserverd

enable and (re-)start the license server, respectively. To test whether the license check-out works correctly, execute:

/opt/schrodinger/licserver/bin/lictest test-server

If this command succeeds, the license is available within the whole Virtual Cluster. To access and share the license with any resources external to the cluster, such as on-premises systems, it must be ensured that TCP connections to the “frontend” instance of the cluster can be established on the TCP port used by the license server daemon. (default port is 53000). Any corporate firewall needs to be configured to allow outgoing traffic on this port and, additionally, the firewall settings for the Virtual Cluster need to be configured to allow incoming traffic on this port.

Note

It is recommended to configure the access rules as restrictive as possible, i.e., allow incoming traffic on the license server port only if it originates from the coporate network.

Access to External Hosted License Servers

The Virtual Cluster can access licenses hosted by external license servers as well. It needs to be ensured that the cluster instances can access the external license server on the TCP port as described in the previous section.

Note

If the Virtual Cluster is supposed to access a license server hosted by Schrödinger (e.g., for FEP+ model 2 licenses), the public IP address of the cluster needs to be safelisted by Schrödinger. The public IP address of the cluster instance can be acquired by executing the command curl ipecho.net/plain on a terminal on any instance of the cluster.

A client license file (file extension “.lic”) containing the following two lines:

{
    "licenseFileType": "server-identifier",
    "serverAddress": "<LICENSE_SERVER_NAME>:<PORT>"
}

needs to be placed in the /opt/schrodinger/licenses directory. The Schrödinger Suite will obtain the information about the external license server from this file and will try to connect to it. It is recommended to test whether the license checkout works correctly by executing the command:

/opt/schrodinger/licserver/bin/lictool test-server <LICENSE_SERVER_NAME>:<PORT>