US 8,763,159 B1Granted

System and method for application license management in virtual environments

AssigneeParallels IP Holdings GmbH

InventorsAlexey Kobets, Alexander G. Tormasov

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Abstract

A system and method for managing licensing of virtual environment applications. A licensing module of a first installed virtual environment application detects installation of affiliated applications and gives them a group licensing key for passing it to the licensing server. The licensing server derives licensing parameters of the affiliated applications from the group key and gives the licenses to the affiliated applications, in case of successful validation. The licensing system provides protection from un-authorized copying of the applications. If an affiliated virtual environment application is copied (or moved) to another hardware node without its virtual environment, the licensing server will not give the license activation key to this virtual environment application.

Claims17

Dependent claims

A computer-implemented method for managing licenses in virtual environments, the method comprising:

launching a virtual environment session on a hardware node;
installing a first application in the virtual environment;
storing a first application license in a license repository;
installing a second application on the hardware node, the second application having the same licensing scheme as the first application;
generating a request, by the second application, the request containing a marker of the licensing scheme and a session identifier;
creating a secure tunnel between the first application and the second application;
sending the request to the first application over the tunnel;
generating, by the first application, a message containing a group license key, if the marker of the licensing scheme of the second application coincides with that of the first application;
encrypting the message with a secret key;
sending the message to the second application over the tunnel;
decrypting the message by the second application and adding an identifier of the second application to the message;
sending the message to a licensing server;
receiving a license activation key from the licensing server, if the licensing server validates the message;
and
activating a license of the second application with the license activation key,
wherein the secret key includes the virtual environment session identifier.

13 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.