Is the License server down?

[stefan.isakov]

Thank you for your questions.
V-Ray license server application is stable enough and in the latest years, it never happened for the V-Ray license server application to stop while you are working with V-Ray. Sometimes when you restart the machine and Windows update is installed or you re-install the license server application, it happened to not start, because of antivirus or a firewall or a faulty process,
but if you borrowed your license for offline usage and it works, it never failed in the middle of the work with V-Ray. The same situation might occur with the dongle, because the driver of the USB dongle may fail, the windows update might broke some of the files or simply the hardware dongle life is over. I understand that you try to make your V-Ray independent, but at this point, the offline licensing is save enough, even more, save and flexible than the hardware USB dongle. Let me know if you have any other hesitations.

[JezUK]

You've avoided my points. I'm not talking about borrowing a licence before problems happen.

I'm talking about when a problem happens - why doesn't the software keep working, say for a few more days, enough time for problems to be rectified ? Why must licences be interrogated constantly, every minute (by the sounds of things) and then not work ?

I've used a dongle for 10 years, I've never had a single problem with it, ever.

I have seen more than enough posts on here from people saying the Licence Server has gone down - even Vlado replied saying there was an intermittent problem where the Licence Server was down for 20 minutes (in one thread), so I disagree with your point that it is never down.

But I have seen others on here saying the Licence Server has gone down (a lot of those people mentioning a tight deadline).

There must be some immediate back up (like a UPS system) under such circumstances - I am trying to understand where this is all going so I can decide how to proceed for my future (i.e. stick with dongle and Next or one day move to being online).

I simply want access to my software 100% of the time, always. It's what I thought I paid for.

[stefan.isakov]

I am sorry, I didn't' mean to avoid your questions. I meant that the V-Ray license server is never down only if you borrowed your license for offline usage. Vlado's suggestion and our suggestions are to borrow your license for offline usage, and this will be safe enough. Yes, our mission is to provide you with 100% working licenses, that is why we recommend you borrow your license and this way the Online licensing is not important because you already borrowed your license. By "Online license server is down" it was meant, that only the Online licensing was not working, not the application and not the offline licenses. I hope that this is clear enough for you. Let me know if you have any other questions.

[JezUK]

We had an intermittent issue for around 20 minutes earlier today; it is resolved now.

Best regards,
Vlado

Why do you keep saying that the V-Ray license server is never down when Vlado said the above ?

So please can you answer my question - it's simple.

Say I have an online licence, I'm not borrowing it, I'm just working in my office as normal on my pc, on a project with a tight deadline (the client is about to go into a meeting in 30 minutes with visuals).

In 5 minutes I'm going to hit the render button.

But the licence server goes down.

My question is;

Will Vray continue working, or does it stop ? Yes or No.

(I am on a dongle so I have never had such problems for 10+ years - I'm just trying to learn how this online licencing currently works).

[stefan.isakov]

In the above-quoted case when our Online licensing is down, this means that there is some problem with our backend server and V-Ray will not be able to work, because of a problem with online licensing.
If your V-Ray license server installed on your machine is using Online licensing and you didn't borrow a license for offline usage, at the moment when we have a problem with our backend server, your internet connection is down or any issue appears, you will not be able to use this online-based license. The issues to our backend server happen rarely, but yes it does happen for a short period of minutes.
That is why we recommend all of our users to borrow their Online based license, to become offline based in case they don't want to have any outages.

[JezUK]

In the above-quoted case when our Online licensing is down, this means that there is some problem with our backend server and V-Ray will not be able to work, because of a problem with online licensing.
If your V-Ray license server installed on your machine is using Online licensing and you didn't borrow a license for offline usage, at the moment when we have a problem with our backend server, your internet connection is down or any issue appears, you will not be able to use this online-based license. The issues to our backend server happen rarely, but yes it does happen for a short period of minutes.
That is why we recommend all of our users to borrow their Online based license, to become offline based in case they don't want to have any outages.

Thank you Stefan - I suspected as much.

But we are both repeating ourselves. You keep suggesting I should borrow a licence and I'm scratching my head wondering why I would ever need to do that if I'm just working in my office.....

There is clearly an issue here and Chaos need to address it.

I'll stick with Dongle for now thanks (hopefully in the future there will be borrowing licenses off Dongle as I note that option isn't currently supported - I guess Chaos won't do this though because you're wanting everyone to go online, a la Autodesk.....).

[stefan.isakov]

Online licensing like every online based application has a weakness and is depended on many factors if for example for some reason your internet is down or our backend server is down. For example, the hardware USB dongle based license has its negatives and problems.
It is up to the user's needs and environment to choose. If you decide to stay with the dongle it's okay, but online-based licensing is more flexible and we are constantly improving it. We can discuss this a lot, but the truth is that in the near future the dongles will be obsolete and only the online licensing will remain.

Our mission #1 is to make our clients happy and not cause any issues, but in the process of developing and making things better, it sometimes happens to have minor issues for which we apologies.
We are constantly improving all of our products and our licensing will be made better and more client-oriented.