Experences migrating from traditional license to subscription

nic1902

I've got a large-ish deployment: ~2000 users with a two node cluster (AS 2.8.7). Our licenses are expiring shortly and we are migrating to the new subscription model. I am looking for comments from anyone who has been through the migration. I've found plenty of good documentation about installing and using the subscription license, but little about the mechanics of the migration. Specifically I'm curious about how much downtime you experienced and any other gotcha's I might need to worry about. Did you have to remove the old licenses first, can they co-exist? Will the the subscription simply takeover without missing a beat once loaded?

Any experience - good or bad - are of interested.

openvpn_inc

Hello nic1902,

Since you have 2.8.7 you are already on a version that supports subscription. Basically all you need to do is grab the activation key for the subscription from our website, then go to your cluster and log in to the Admin UI. Next go to remote view mode for the first node and go to its activation page. Simply enter the activation key there and then what will happen is that the subscription will become active immediately on this node. In our tests in this situation your clients will not even be disconnected -it's a totally seamless transition. If you're worried about interruptions its still prudent to do this at a proper maintenance window, but I really don't expect any issues.

The fixed license keys that you had on this server will simply become suppressed and not visible on the Admin UI anymore. You don't have to remove them - you can leave them. The subscription that you activate will just take over instead and you'll just see your subscription. The fixed license keys will still be there. If for example you were to deactivate the subscription from this server, the fixed license keys would just come back.

Next exit the remote view mode and go to the second node and activate the subscription there too - same process. And that's it. Your settings don't change, your users don't get disconnected, and it's just a totally seamless process.

And regarding your fixed license keys - if they are still valid for a while, let's say they expire in July for example, then you can contact us on our support ticket system at https://openvpn.net/support and request that the old fixed license keys get credited to your account. Then the next time you scale up your subscription or buy a subscription or it gets renewed, your credit can be used for that.

Kind regards,
Johan

mminfra

We are also about to switch from licenses to subscriptions. The subscription requires " constant direct access to asb.sts.openvpn.net". Now we have a third party dependency. Is there a time limit between the AS loosing connectivity to asb.sts.openvpn.net and the subscriptions being deactivated? Is there a status page or published SLA for the service?

Thanks,

openvpn_inc

Hello,

The subscription system is extremely robust and can withstand downtimes of days. It's better explained here;
https://openvpn.net/faq/does-license-activation-require-internet-access/

But simply put, our infrastructure would have to be down in multiple locations for more than a week before you would ever notice a thing. And we have an extremely robust infrastructure across multiple geographical regions with automatic failover. In plain English, it won't ever go down long enough for you to experience an issue with that. We guarantee a 99.9% uptime for the subscription system. And the 0.1% shouldn't affect you because of how robust the subscription system is.

If you like, you can create a free subscription on our website. It will give you just 2 connections on the free subscription, but you can then see how it works without committing to paying anything for it.

Kind regards,
Johan