recently we restored an Image of our VMWare PlanetPress machine, v8.1.
After restoring it, the license was expired, due to the presence of a new magic-number.
The documentation states the following:
Supported Virtual Environments (PlanetPress Suite 7.5.1 and higher)
VMWare, including VMotion, VSphere, VMView.
Hyper-V.
Important note on virtual environments:
Starting with version 7.5.1, PlanetPress Suite is able to detect a number of virtual environments in addition to the ones listed above. To check whether your own virtual environment is properly detected, just launch PlanetPress Design and look at the main window’s caption bar. If it states PlanetPress Design for your_virtual_environment, it means the virtual environment was successfully detected, which in turn means that PlanetPress Suite should not run into de-activation issues caused by rebooting the server or moving the virtual image to another server. Note, however, that successful detection of a virtual environment not listed above does not mean it is officially supported. It simply means that if the virtualization server does a good job of virtualizing (!), then there’s no reason the application should not behave the same as when running on a physical server, but that Objectif Lune has not yet been able to certify the application runs properly under that specific environment.
In addition to the list above, the following environments should be detected properly (but are not yet officially supported): Virtual-PC, VirtualBox, Parallels, KVM, Xen, Bochs-based and Wine.
Our server runs Win2008 in a VMWare VM, and the “for VMWare” text appear on the application caption bar (Workflow).
Is there a safe way/procedure to avoid this. Shouldn’t it be supposed to work, as VMWare is officially supported?
It is hard to tell exactly what occured in this case. There may be some clues on the system or there may not. I am not sure why a restore on a VM would reset the magic number and further troubleshooting would be required to see if this problem is reproducible. However, for the sake of getting up and running I advise you to contact activations@ca.objectiflune.com to request another License for that new magic number. If you would like to investigate this issue further please open up a ticket at Document composition and automation | Upland Objectif Lune so we can better assess your situation. Thank you!
One theory that I may offer: The magic number is partially based on hardware configuration, and in some cases that configuration may change. For instance, when you make a copy of a virtual machine, VMWare will ask you if you if you moved or copied the machine. Telling it that “I moved it” does not change hardware configuration. Telling it “I copied it” changes some of the hardware IDs which causes the magic number to change in turn.
This would happen if you made a ghost image of your system on one system and restored it on another system, even if it was identical in terms of hardware: it’s not exactly the same, because the hardware is physically different. So it’s a similar issue with VMWare.