Quick questions on license renewal

Help Orchestrator
,
#1

Hello all,

this is my first post in this forum, after +4 years doing the other 2 of the big 3 (you know which ones) just moved to a new company where UiPath is the weapon of choice. Things is I’m the entire RPA team, so quite soon I’ll need to renew the license(s) and also upgrade the software, I think.

Have a couple questions on this regard, before most likely contacting support for assistance:

  • is the license renewal necessarily tied to software upgrade? We have two installations/orchestrators: one is 2019.4.4 and the other 2018.4.1. In any case, is there a preferred order on how to do this (first renew-then upgrade or viceversa)?

  • also, we have two licenses. One of them is used in the two installations/orchestrators and the other is exlusively used for a dedicated UAT tenant in the first one. Is this something that is usually done or am I inheriting a total mess of an infra?

  • finally, for the renewal, I’m reading on how it’s done in docs. See that you need to enter they key(s) in a portal and then you will get your license file(s), am I right? Will they be different keys to the current ones (like in different string of numbers)?

Thanks a lot in advance,
J.

1 Like
#2

Hello @JMGRX!

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1 Like
#3

Hi JMGRX,
welcome to the community!

tl;dr:
Question 1: No, licenses are not bound to product versions
Question 2: Need more info to give answer (see below)
Question 3: You usually reach out to UiPath representative or UiPath Partner, that helped implementing. License Key remains the same, but will be updated in UiPath system

Can you maybe elaborate on the setup in a bit more detail? I am thinking of how many machines, tenants. Which licenses on which tenants and product versions etc. In order to give you advice, it would also be good to understand the amount of processes running on each Orchestrator and Tenant.

Maybe use this format below?

Orchestrator #1 - 2018.4.1

  • Tenant #1 (UAT) Licenses Type: Non-Production Unattended Robot, Studio
  • Tenant #2 (Prod) Licenses Type: Unattended Robot (Node Locked)

Orchestrator #2 - 2019.4.4

  • Tenant #1 (UAT) Licenses Type: Non-Production Unattended Robot, Studio
  • Tenant #2 (Prod) Licenses Type: Unattended Robot (Node Locked)
1 Like
#4

Hi @JMGRX
Welcome to Uipath Community

Answer: There no dependency between Version upgrade and License renewal. you can upgrade your version anytime as your need, but license renewal has to be done according to the expiration days.

Answer : If you are managing 2 different versions of orchestrators yes you may have 2 licenses but, I worrying about why do you using 2019 & 2018.
and If you use multiple tenants for UAT and PROD again you don’t need to fix 2 licenses for each tenant. you can license the Host tenant first, then you can province the relevant robot into relevant tenant.

Answer :
yes you are right , license renewal can be done either offline or online
Once your license complete the renewal payment process go to https://activate.uipath.com/orchestrator
Enter your License Code and version and generate your License file and save it somewhere and
login to your Orchestrator and click the “Renew” and upload the license file, that’s it

1 Like
#5

Thanks a lot, I was worried I would need to renew license and upgrade at the same time, and being completely new to the platform was a little scared about that.

On the infra, it actually goes like:

2019.4.4: two tenants for dev (2 studio) and tst (1 unattended robot)
2018.4.1: prd, 4 unattended robots

(Looks like they updated non-prod software but never did it with production.)

What I find a bit strange is that the dev tenant in the 2019 is tied to the same license key used in prd, while the tst tenant uses a different one. Does it make sense?

Thanks,
J.

1 Like
#6

Thanks a lot for your reply, you can see my previous reply too.

Best,
J.

1 Like
#7

@JMGRX
you can have multiple licenses for multiple tenants or also you can have one license for multiple tenants, and simply say yes its possible to have 2 orchestrators in one license It’s ok.

This may you to confuse that because previously the license purchase method.
If you are able to contact the Vendor (provide the license to your organization) or your region support staff of Uipath to find out the current license patterns.

You may purchase bulk for the same License key, hope you can check if you can get the information previously this managed or just contact as said before will help you to find out the details information.

Anyway, let me give you another more something …
Why do you using 2018.4.1 still? , I suggest that even go for 19.10 upgrade
and you don’t need to keep 2 Orchestrator even with different versions
If you need to separate function for “TEST” & “DEV” you can create a separate tenant for those.

and even not that, consider the some of other situation even you can create (Units/Folders) to separate PROD /TEST/DEV in the same tenant in the same orchestrator

1 Like
#8

This indeed looks like a little mess.

I disagree with @Maneesha_de_silva on the DEV/TEST/PROD on one machine solution, as I prefer to segregate Dev/Test workloads from Prod for multiple reasons like software lifecycle management, license handling and governance.

You should align license keys with UiPath (contact support) and like @Maneesha_de_silva mentioned, update your out of date Orchestrator to 2019.10 first. After that, I would recommend upgrading first Dev/Test Orchestrator to newest LTS version, update studios and nonproduction robot to newest LTS version and then upgrade the production Orchestrator as well.

PS: Your Unattended Robots in Production also are running on 2018.4 I assume? Try to keep them in sync with Prod Orchestrator when you upgrade.

1 Like
#9

@kc-x I hope you have misunderstood, I mean it for Orchestrator Levels Intancase and Tenants,
Not for managing machine (robots)
and also that’s why I mentioned " :wink:", there was plenty of situation some of the customers cannot having 2 separate orchestrators due to infra limitations.
Its depend on how Administrators manage it

1 Like
#10

@Maneesha_de_silva Also for Orchestrator, we typically have 2 machines at the moment (same DB in the background, though).

We had issues in the past, when migrating Orchestrator and also like to have a place where we can test newest LTS version, without breaking anything in production. It’s usually not a problem when you have a couple of processes in prod, but some of our clients have 100-200+ process in production - and you don’t want to mess with that :slight_smile:

1 Like
#11

@kc-x
Are you talking about VMs or something else ?

#12

@kc-x
This the reason that Uipath available Following infra levels
Disaster Recovery
Multi Node Deployment
High Availability

better check with that.

#13

I am not talking about redundancy. When you update Orchestrator and you have exactly one instance (with one tenant for each stage) and the Update breaks your Robots, then you have a big problem. You have no chance of testing in advance and rolling back is a mess and business will hate you for breaking their bots in production. Also, if you have all stages on one instance, users can accidentally (or willingly, hehe) deploy to production without testing first. It requires advanced role governance, when you handle everything on one instance.

Has its down- and upsides, but IMHO the upsides of having two instances are significantly higher. But I can understand, when smaller organizations start with one instance and later move to a second one. That is also legit.

#14

Thanks both for your useful inputs, I’m taking notes here.

Best,
J.

#15

Guys, now we are in the topic, is there a quick & easy way to tell where the DB for each instance is hosted/served from? I had assumed it was same server than Orchestrator (quite small infra), but after taking a quick peek doesnt look like it. I’m used to separate servers for DB from my previous jobs.

Thanks!