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Free Starter Licenses count in Multi-Cluster setup on Kasten 5.5.8

D
Userlevel 1

Hi,

 

We have just upgraded our Kasten K10 multi-cluster environment to 5.5.8, and now some clusters say they don’t have license.

For upgrading we used this guide:

Upgrading — K10 5.5.8 documentation (kasten.io)

New License Management feature:

License Management — K10 5.5.8 documentation (kasten.io)

All our clusters have less then 5 nodes individually, and previously all were counted individually from their 5 free local license pool. So everything was fine up until now. But after upgrading, now all the secondary clusters display the “default” 5 node starter-license (starter-4f1842c0-0745-41a5-aaa7-a01d748b1c30) as Duplicate, so they don’t contribute to the global mc pool, and also don’t have valid local license either (probably because of the “Duplicate” status).

Does this mean that the licensing terms have also changed by this version? And now we have to count licenses globally (in a multi-cluster scenario), and not Per Cluster?

(These clusters are for different small tenants actually, so they are different end users, but centrally managed by us, that’s why we used multi-cluster setup).

 

Thanks,

Daniel

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Best answer by Hagag 18 April 2023, 11:07

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7 comments

Hagag
Userlevel 5
Badge +2

Hi @Daniel Zentai Allow me to verify this in my testing lab, and I will provide you with an update shortly.

G
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Daniel,

 

Friendly reminder that 5 nodes free license is allowing 5 free worker nodes per company and not per cluster :) Happy to help you with your dedicated Veeam field team for any licensing related discussion !

 

Hope that the solution that @Hagag provided is working.

D
Userlevel 1

Hello Gatien,

We also contacted our Veeam Sales representative of course to figure this out. It was just wasn’t clear if this is an intended change or a bug, that’s why I wrote here. 

These are mostly demo and lab environments of different end users, and I have read the EULA and the kasten.io web site, but it wasn’t clear for me if they count per company or per cluster. 

Anyway some of the cluster will soon turn into prod clusters, so we are already planning to switch to Enterprise license to get full support. So it seems this is the right time.

 

What @Hagag recommended didn’t work, we are still short of licenses if we only have the free starter licenses on the clusters, because all the default starter licenses show up as Duplicates (thus invalid) except on one cluster.

 

G
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Daniel, happy to help if needed with our counterpart.

 

@Hagag will check with engineering if this is the expected behavior with the new multicluster in the meantime.

Hagag
Userlevel 5
Badge +2

@Daniel Zentai 
 

Despite the warning about a duplicated license in my secondary cluster, it is still able to lease nodes from the contributed pool instead of the local one, as shown in the screenshot from my secondary cluster. I recommend restarting the deployment of the controllermanager-svc in the primary cluster and rechecking the issue.
 

kubectl rollout restart deployment controllermanager-svc -n kasten-io


Suppose you have three clusters using the same starter license ID. Only one of the clusters should have a valid license ID for license contribution, while the remaining two clusters with duplicated licenses will not be utilized for contribution.
​​​​​​​

P.S
It is not essential for the contribution to come from your primary cluster. It could originate from any of your secondary clusters. Our Engineering team needs to confirm whether this is the expected behavior or not.

In order to gain a more comprehensive understanding of your environment, kindly provide the license page for each of your clusters, including the primary cluster.



 

 

D
Userlevel 1

@Hagag 

This is an example:

We have 4 clusters, one is our management k8s cluster and used only to host the Primary Kasten instance, the other three clusters are for our customer’s devops k8s clusters for software testing.

All of these clusters individually have less then 5 nodes, and previously all of them worked by consuming their local standalone Starter licenses. Since each of them fit into the 5 node limit.

However if we add them up, they have 13 nodes all together. But with the new license management MC provides 10 node free license it seems (why?), the Starter licenses of the other clusters are not counted as they are duplicates, but the sum of 13 nodes do not fit into the “new” 10 node limit any more.

 

As I see now, we have probably misunderstood the EULA of the Starter edition, and nodes should have been counted all together (as a customer) and not per K10 cluster. So we are going to purchase licenses and that will solve this issue.

 

 

Here are the screenshots of the situation:

only hosts K10 Primary instance
here it is already exceeded

 

Hagag
Userlevel 5
Badge +2

@Daniel Zentai 

According to the information you provided, if you are utilizing the same license ID across all of your clusters, this is the expected behavior. One of the installed clusters will be chosen as the "owner" of the license when (in this case, the starter license) is installed in several clusters.
and I can see that one of your clusters is using 4 nodes plus 6 nodes for contributions, which adds up to the 10 nodes that the starter license allows you to use in total.
You are renting 5 of the 6 nodes for the other clusters, but your final cluster, which has 4 nodes, is no longer able to rent from the pool due to a dearth of contributed nodes.


To solve this issue, I recommend either upgrading your license or disabling Multi-Cluster License Management by editing the Cluster resource for the primary cluster and removing the ingress URL field. If you choose to disable this feature, each of your clusters will be able to use its own starter license while still utilizing the multi-cluster functionality.

 


Set the spec.k10.ingress.url field using kubectl edit:

kubectl edit -n kasten-io-mc cluster <PRIMARY_CLUSTER>


 

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