Multiple Production Environment

[JoshuaKingsley]

Can we have multiple production environment? Our client have purchased 100 BOTs License. Right now, we have 6 processes running on approximately 80 machines concurrently. Remaining 20 machines are in reserve in case of higher loads. There are few processes in the Pipe line. Shall we use the same licenses (100) in a new Production database for the upcoming processes?

[peterlacken]

I am pretty sure this will break the terms and conditions of your clients agreement with Blue Prism.

[JoshuaKingsley]

Thanks for your response. We are NOT doing it. I'm just curious to understand why BP says the following in the this KB article - https://help.blueprism.com/1136050552 1. Normally Blue Prism licensing places a restriction on the number of concurrent sessions. 2. Your license is purchased for use in a Production system, however you are free to use the same license for development and testing, even if you use separate databases for these environments. They have restrictions in number of concurrent sessions in a Database. Also they encourage using same license in separate databases. Can't we split Production Environment based on the Line of Business, still under a same Organization?  I don't have access to the Terms and Conditions or the Contract. I'm just curious and would like to know if there are any legal terms NOT to have Multiple Production Environment.   Joshua

[david.l.morris]

Hi Joshua, As far as I know, there is no restriction from having multiple production environments. In fact, I'm pretty confident Blue Prism documentation indicates this is an option but specifically states that your license consumption limit is not per environment but instead is based on adding up all concurrent sessions across the environments if they are using the same license file. So if you had a license limit of 100 sessions and you had 4 production environments, any of them could run up to 100 at once so that there are 400 sessions running concurrently. But if you were audited, this would be a breach of terms. The only way to strictly separate lines of business before Multi-Team Environments (BP 6.3+) was to have entirely separate production environments. Even now, some things such as Environment Variables are not separate even in MTE, but the processes, objects, and their logs are all possible to keep separate by using access rights. Respectfully, Dave

[AmiBarrett]

What BP support told us, and this also seems to be backed by the KB article, is that the agreement for your license only covers a single production instance. However, test and dev instances, which are not production, are allowed to use the same license file.

[JoshuaKingsley]

Thank you Dave and Amibarrett.

[TracySchultz]

Just seeking clarification of my understanding based on the KB and what is written here.

1. We can use the same license for test and dev.
2. We can have a DB per environment.
3. The license looks at concurrent sessions which are sessions that not manually run while building or debugging a session.

Is my understanding right?

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Tracy Schultz
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[Walter.Koller]

Well, I don't see any reason not to have several production environments if license agreements are not breached.
If I have 10 licenses and distribute 5 to one production environment and 5 to another production environment, everything will be fine.
Also the community request for centralized license management indicates this is not uncommon. 

1. We can use the same license for test and dev
Yes, you can and you are also encouraged to do so since there is nothing like a dev or test type of license (at least the last time when I asked BP support for one)

2. We can have a DB per environment
I don't understand this assumption. Maybe there is a confusion of used terms? There has to be one (and only one) repository DB per BP instance. One BP instance is serving one environment instance, ie if you have two development environments then you need to have two repository DB.
MS SQL server comprises SQL server instance and one or more DB inside this instance.
In our case we use one SQL server instance per environment zone. So one SQL server instance for all development environments, one instance for one test environments, one instance for production environments. You might want to have a different set-up because you want to eg have a hard separation between different production environment. 
Normally it is not recommended to mix different zones, eg have development and production on the same SQL server instance or even on the same DB server.

For us it looks similar to:

App Server BP Dev		DB Server Dev
		MS SQL Server Instance 1
BP Dev Instance 1	>	DB BP Repository 1
BP Dev Instance 2	>	DB BP Repository 2

3. Yes, locally run processes are not counted as used licenses.

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Walter Koller
Solution Manager
Erste Group IT International GmbH
Europe/Vienna
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[namshriv_1658]

Can we use the same production license in the Development/Test environment in parallel for optimum utilization of the maximum number of concurrent sessions?

For example :
Max concurrent sessions allowed = 100
Can we use the same license file in Production and development in parallel? In case currently, we don't have requirement to run in production 100  concurrent sessions.
Production:  80 concurrent sessions  
Development: 20 concurrent sessions

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Namrata Shrivastava
Blue Prism Developer
IBM GBS
Europe/London
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