Company purchased Vray for me, I have been able to use it 14 days in a whole year.

[colin_cooper]

First off, For Maya 2023, Vray 6. Windows 10 Enterprise.

Here's the list of issues we've had.
- Download link provided was for V ray 5, which tried to install the material library, which failed on install every single time. Finally went hunting for the installer and downloaded Vray 6 instead, that didn't try to install the media library and finally installed.
- Online Licensing doesn't work through our firewall, IT department checks it out and says there is nothing about their security that should make online licensing not work, but it never works.
- Contact support and are given lengthy instruction to use offline license borrowing, this involves the following:

• Stopping the chaos license server,
• Opening appdata/chaos/VRLservice and deleted the SSL Folder
• Restarting the chaos license server
• Opened License Server and was prompted to sign in to activate, did nothing here as per the PDF instructions
• Went to my.chaosgroup.com logged in, selected my license server, selected borrow licenses.
• Selected 1 of every license and clicked next, it auto increased the number borrowed for some licenses in including one where it tried to increase it to 3 and wouldn’t let me proceed until I removed one to go back to 2 as we only have 2 licenses for that.
• Download the offline.bin file
• Went back to the License Server tab only to realize you have to sign in and activate because there is no way to borrow licenses otherwise which isn’t stated directly in the offline license borrowing instructions on the website.
• Uploaded my cert.csr from when I did this originally to activate my license server
• Clicked on the red flashing “online licensing” at the top of the page and selected “use licenses offline”
• Uploaded my offline.bin file and clicked upload.

-This worked the second time I did it, the first time It didn't, I have no idea why, but I repeated the process and it worked...for 14 days until the borrowed license expires.
- I then have to contact support to release the licenses so I can borrow them again as the link to release borrowed licenses only appears on a working license server page, which I do not get because mine just said "no licenses available" and wouldn't allow me to release the licenses I don't have.
- Licenses are released to borrow again so I select 1 of each license to borrow and try to proceed only to see that it has increased the number of licenses to borrow on some licenses to more licenses than I can borrow and will not let me proceed.
- Support informs me that multiples of some licenses are needed.......but not which ones, why or why it auto increased the number of licenses borrowed to more licenses than I have to borrow.
- Repeated the license borrowing process again allowing it to automatically increase the number of licenses borrowed while also reducing any numbers that exceed the possible number of licenses I can borrow.
- Repeated the full license borrowing procedure above in the bulleted list MANY times to no avail, borrowed licenses never function again. uploading offline.bin files into the license server page never displays any progress, it just instantly loads the "no licenses borrowed" page. seems like it's not uploading anything.
- Support then finally informs me that I can just place my offline.bin file into C:\Program Files\Chaos Group\VRLService\OLS.....this directory does not exist. C:\Program Files\Chaos\VRLServices does exist but there is no OLS folder inside that location.
- Ask support to confirm that they really meant C:\Program Files\Chaos Group and not C:\Program Files\Chaos as the Chaos Group dir only contains Chaos Cosmos and Vray folders where as \Chaos does contain the VRLServices folder. Informed by support that it should indeed be C:\Program Files\Chaos Group\VRLService\OLS and that is correct and if that folder does not exist then my install is corrupted and should be reinstalled. Yet it worked before, with no reinstalls happening after the original successful license borrowing.
- Install Vray 6 multiple times over and it has never once created a VRLServices and OLS folders inside \Chaos Group\ Nor has it created one inside \Chaos\ either. Tried creating this folder structure myself and placing Offline.bin in there, which also did nothing.
-Still can't use Vray.

This is embarrassing. Our Vray license is up for renewal and at this point the company doesn't even want to renew it as they deem it non-functional. There has to be a way to actually use this program without going through this ordeal.

[glorybound]

It is a well-used piece of software, so I would guess it is an internal IT issue. Maybe something blocking ports.

[colin_cooper]

Oh we are 100% blocking ports anything else related to Chaos Group, that's not the issue. We are going to use it as an offline license where that shouldn't matter, and this was verified by Chaos that this would be something we could do as we knew going in we wouldn't allow software that needs to reach out to an external server for licensing. It's just that nothing about their license server works the way they think it does.

[JezUK]

This clearly demonstrates the pain that is licensing of software - that the honest people out there (like you) are made to suffer because of the dishonest people out there.

I really think that amongst the many videos which Chaos put out regarding V-Ray etc, they could also put out a few on Licensing (it'd probably need to be an hour long.....)