> Smart Licensing works differently. Companies can acquire a pool of licenses for their account, which are shared automatically among devices they’ve deployed. Those devices phone home to Cisco regularly for validation, and if they aren’t able to do so will go back to “Evaluation Mode” after one year.
It doesn't sound unusual to me, I feel it's just the usual "Enterprise" bullshit, where you have little control or internal knowledge over your equipment, and must follow a restrictive licensing plan and use official support to keep it running. I think the most extreme version is the IBM mainframe computers, if you DRM license module is inoperative, the computer is essentially reduced to a huge piece of useless junk. Other enterprise hardware/software is not too restrictive, but still follows the same pattern, such as Oracle products.
the fact that devices need to phone home can be major issue, especially with networks not connected to the Internet.
Also, degrading a device because of a license issue can become a huge liability.
What if the smart licensing service has a technical error, and all switches in your datacenter go down because they no longer support the software features you require?
From my experience with other datacenter network vendors, most seem to just do a vanity kind of licensing where they basically audit you every X years for licenses.
It doesn't sound unusual to me, I feel it's just the usual "Enterprise" bullshit, where you have little control or internal knowledge over your equipment, and must follow a restrictive licensing plan and use official support to keep it running. I think the most extreme version is the IBM mainframe computers, if you DRM license module is inoperative, the computer is essentially reduced to a huge piece of useless junk. Other enterprise hardware/software is not too restrictive, but still follows the same pattern, such as Oracle products.