Overview of licensing

All customers must have a software license to run mental ray. A license is a coded record of your software purchase. The license resides in a license file on your machine or a license server machine. Whenever a mental ray session is launched, the license management software, SPM, searches the license file to check out a license for that session.

Types of licenses

Floating and client licenses

A floating license lets several users run mental ray from any computer on the same network. For example, if you install a license for five users on your network, up to five machines can run mental ray at one time.

Each user's computer-called a client-gets a floating license from a computer that serves licenses-called the license server. The license server can also serve itself a license. The mental ray license server requires a hardware lock (dongle) to run.

What licensing does

The licensing process creates the license file, if necessary, and adds your new mental ray license to the end of that file.