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Compatibility and Performance Notes

Compatibility

The RMS license server runs as a system Service on Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista/Server 2008.

Also, the license server is cross-platform compatible—that is, the license server running on an operating system can communicate with a client running on another operating system.

Note: The license server can communicate over a single IP address only on a multi-home PC. You do not have choice to specify any particular IP address for use by the license server. If the IP address to which license server is bound becomes unavailable for any reason, then the license server needs to be restarted to allow using any other IP address on the system.

Performance Notes

High performance is always a consideration on a busy network. There are several things you can do to optimize the speed with which licenses are acquired by your network users, and to speed up the use of RMS utilities:

The computers on which license servers run should use static IP addresses rather than dynamically allocated IP addresses (DHCP). In fact, redundant license server computers must use static IP addresses.
Client computers should directly contact the license server that services the licenses used by that client. The LSHOST and LSFORCEHOST environment variables or the lshost file can be used to do this.
Client computers should contain a hosts file that maps IP addresses to the host names of the computers on which license servers reside; this speeds up contacting those license servers. For Windows 2000/XP/2003, this file is probably located in \System32\Drivers\Etc. The file itself contains instructions on entry format.