Managing Liferay DXP Subscriptions

Note: LCS is deprecated and will be shut down on December 31, 2021. Customers who activate LCS are advised to replace it with our latest activation key type which is suitable for virtualized environments.

For further information, please see Changes to Liferay Product Activation.

LCS lets you use and view your Liferay DXP subscriptions. Recall that when you create an environment, you assign its subscription type and choose whether LCS activates servers that connect to that environment. If you use LCS for activation, registering a server in that environment consumes an activation key from the environment’s subscription type. You can also view your project’s available activation keys and see how they’re being used.

Depending on your subscription agreement, LCS also lets you register servers via elastic subscriptions. Elastic subscriptions let you register an unlimited number servers. This is invaluable in auto-scaling environments, where servers are automatically created and destroyed in response to load. Note that to use elastic subscriptions, you must set the environment as elastic when you create it. Also note that LCS only uses elastic subscriptions for servers that exceed the number that the environment’s subscription type allows. In other words, LCS uses the environment’s regular subscriptions before any elastic subscriptions.

You can access these features from the Subscriptions tab on the upper-left of the LCS site. This tab contains two other tabs: Details and Elastic Subscriptions.

Figure 1: LCS lets you view and manage your subscriptions.

There are four tables in the Details tab:

1. Subscriptions: Shows a list of the available subscriptions in your LCS project. For each subscription, this table shows the following information:

   • Subscription Type
   • Start Date
   • Expiration Date
   • Support End Date
   • Platform
   • Product
   • Processor Cores Allowed
   • Activation Keys
   • Used Activation Keys

   Note that Processor Cores Allowed shows the number of processor cores that the subscription allows for each server.

2. Subscriptions Summary: Shows how your subscriptions are currently used in your project. For each subscription type, this table shows the number of activation keys allowed, used, and available.

3. Project Environments: Shows your project’s environments and their assigned subscription types. Each environment must have a subscription type.

4. Project Servers: Shows the environment and subscription type for each server in your LCS project.

If any of the information in these tables is missing or incorrect, contact Liferay Support.

Note: If you don’t use LCS for activating your servers, then you can register as many servers as you want in LCS.

Note: If you try to activate a server that exceeds the number of processor cores that your subscription allows per server, the activation fails and the server is locked down. A console error also indicates the server’s core count. You can compare this with your subscription’s processor cores allowed in LCS’s Subscriptions table. To activate the server, you can either reduce the number of cores it uses (e.g., by deploying to different server hardware, or reducing the number of virtual processors in a VM or container), or contact Liferay Sales to increase the number of processor cores that your subscription allows per server.

Decommissioning Servers

To decommission a server and free its activation key for reuse, select the server’s environment on the left and then select the server. In the server’s Server Settings tab, select Unregister. Also note that when you shut down a server normally, its activation key is immediately freed for reuse. If the server crashes or its shutdown is forced (e.g., kill), its activation key is freed for reuse within six minutes.

Elastic Subscriptions

Elastic subscriptions let you register an unlimited number of servers. This is crucial for auto-scaling environments where servers are created and destroyed automatically. You can view data on your elastic servers from the Subscriptions tab’s Elastic Subscriptions tab.

Note: To register elastic servers in an environment, that environment must be set as elastic when it’s created. For more information, see the documentation on creating environments.

Figure 2: The *Elastic Subscriptions* tab shows details about your project's elastic servers.

The Elastic Subscriptions tab displays the number of elastic servers online and the uptime details for each. A graph shows the number of elastic servers online each day, while a table lists each elastic server’s start time, end time, and duration. The total duration for servers is below the table. To download a report of the table’s data, click Download Report. Also, you can use the Environment and Month selectors above the graph to select the environment and month to show data from, respectively. The data in both the graph and the table reflect your selections here.