Overview

Smart Software Licensing enables you to manage and monitor Cisco Content Security Management appliance licenses seamlessly. To activate Smart Software licensing, you must register your appliance with Cisco Smart Software Manager (CSSM) which is the centralized database that maintains the licensing details about all the Cisco products that you purchase and use. With Smart Licensing, you can register with a single token rather than registering them individually on the website using Product Authorization Keys (PAKs).

Once you register the appliance, you can track your appliance licenses and monitor license usage through the CSSM portal. The Smart Agent installed on the appliance connects the appliance with CSSM and passes the license usage information to the CSSM to track the consumption.

See https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/wireless/technology/mesh/8-2/b_Smart_Licensing_Deployment _Guide.html to know about Cisco Smart Software Manager.

Make sure that your appliance has internet connectivity.
Contact Cisco sales team to create a smart account in Cisco Smart Software Manager portal (https://software.cisco.com/#module/SmartLicensing) or install a Cisco Smart Software Manager Satellite on your network.

See https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/wireless/technology/mesh/8-2/b_Smart_Licensing_ Deployment_Guide.html to know more about Cisco Smart Software Manager user account creation or installing a Cisco Smart Software Manager Satellite.

For users who do not want to directly send the license usage information to the internet, the Smart Software Manager Satellite can be installed on the premises, and it provides a subset of CSSM functionality. Once you download and deploy the satellite application, you can manage licenses locally and securely without sending data to CSSM using the internet. The CSSM Satellite periodically transmits the information to the cloud.

Note

If you want to use Smart Software Manager Satellite, use Smart Software Manager Satellite Enhanced Edition 6.1.0.
The existing users of classical licenses (traditional) should migrate their classical licenses to smart licenses.

See https://video.cisco.com/detail/video/5841741892001/convert-classic-licenses-to-smart-licenses?autoStart=true&q=classic.
The system clock of the appliance must be in sync with that of the CSSM. Any deviation in the system clock of the appliance with that of the CSSM, will result in failure of smart licensing operations.

Note	If you have internet connectivity and want to connect to the CSSM through a proxy, you must use the same proxy that is configured for the appliance using System Administration-> Update Settings

Note

For virtual users, every time you receive a new PAK file (new or renewal), generate the license file and load the file on the appliance. After loading the file, you must convert the PAK to Smart Licensing. In Smart Licensing mode, the feature keys section in the license file will be ignored while loading the file and only the certificate information will be used.

License Reservation

You can reserve licenses for features enabled in Secure Email and Web Manager without connecting to the Cisco Smart Software Manager (CSSM) portal. This is mainly beneficial for users that deploy Secure Email and Web Manager in a highly secured network environment with no communication to the Internet or external devices.

The feature licenses can be reserved in any one of the following modes:

Specific License Reservation (SLR) – use this mode to reserve licenses for individual features (for example, ‘Mail Handling’) for a given time-period.
Permanent License Reservation (PLR) – use this mode to reserve licenses for all features permanently.

For more information on how to reserve the licenses in Secure Email and Web Manager, see Reserving Feature Licenses.

Device Led Conversion

After you register Secure Email and Web Manager with smart licensing, all existing, valid classical licenses are automatically converted to smart licenses using the Device Led Conversion (DLC) process. These converted licenses are updated in the virtual account of the CSSM portal.

Note	The DLC process takes approximately an hour to complete.

You can view the status of the DLC process – ‘success’ or ‘failed’ in any one of the following ways:

Device Led Conversion status field under the 'Smart Software Licensing Status' section in the System Administration > Smart Software Licensing page of the web interface.
Conversion Status entry in the license_smart > status sub command in the CLI.

Note	When the DLC process fails, the system sends a system alert that details the reason for the failure. You need to fix the issue and then use the `license_smart` > `conversion_start` sub command in the CLI to manually convert the classical licenses to smart licenses.

Note	The DLC process is applicable only for classic licenses and not for the SLR or PLR modes of license reservation.

You must perform the following procedures to activate Smart Software Licensing for your appliance:


	Do This	More Informaton
Step 1	Enable Smart Software Licensing	Enabling Smart Software Licensing
Step 2	Register the appliance with Cisco Smart Software Manager	Registering the Appliance with Cisco Smart Software Manager
[Optional] Step 3	Reserve the feature licenses in Secure Email and Web Manager, if required.	Reserving Feature Licenses
Step 4	Request for licenses (feature keys)	Requesting for Licenses