Managing SBC Licenses

You need a valid license from Ribbon to enable functionality on Ribbon SBCs. Each SBC license provides a base set of capabilities to which additional features and capacity can be added and enabled as required. Ribbon offers multiple licensing options to meet various customer use cases and deployments.

• Node-Locked Licensing  -  This is the traditional and most common method of licensing on SBC. All sessions and features are locked to a specific SBC node which is identified through its hardware serial number or Virtual Machine Universal Unique Identifier (UUID).  
• Network-Wide Licensing  - Ribbon provides a network-wide licensing (NWL) option for customers who do not want licensing capacity to be defined on each node level. Instead, they purchase a total number of sessions and a feature set intended to meet the requirements of their entire network. Note, NWL uses the same underlying node-locked licenses, but additional ‘burst’ licenses are installed to allow flexibility in capacity.
• Network-Wide Domain Licensing – Network-wide domain licensing (NWDL) licensing is offered to SBC SWe cloud deployments where SBC instances may be brought up and down dynamically based on traffic. In this model, a domain license is bound to the domain through public/private key-pairing and it defines the features and capacity allowed for all nodes within the domain. When a new SBC node is brought up, it can leverage licenses from the domain pool.

NWL and NWDL licensing require customers to agree to share license usage data with Ribbon. Consult with your Ribbon sales representative for more information on NWL and to determine the best licensing options for your deployment.