Now that we're all using flexed licensing... has anyone else ran in to a problem using on-prem agents where you need to give a unique IP for the Pooled Licensing? The problem is that we're running some bigger environments and have set up two Agents and enabled the HA in NetScaler Console. Everything was running smoothly for quite a bit, but now only the "other" Agent is running the licensing and all NetScalers are running on grace (we have a support case for the faulty agent). I would like to have both of the agents available for the licensing as well (without me changing the IP in all the NetScalers manually).

From an analytics/telemetry standpoint I can understand the wish to have a redundant HA NetScaler Agent capability. But, when it comes to licensing, I do not see why you would concern yourself to have redundancy when the licensing will go into a grace period for 30 days giving ample time to recover or repoint the license server.

For the case I'm dealing with, I have a couple of appliances that have now less than 50h grace left and after two support calls they haven't been able to sort it out. Also, if your licensing agent gets borked and on the same go your NetScaler reboots, they will lose the capacity. In a disaster recovery scenario I would appreciate having HA on the licensing side-of-things as well. All in all, the licensing change is driven by the vendor and I think we need to spend way too much time on stuff that should just work.

I have always hounded the vendors that Licensing is not something I need. I don't need to prove to myself I bought the license. They need me to prove it to them. So, the effort and cost should be on them. That said, this new requirement of licensing for NetScalers is causing more troubles than it should. I can understand the position you are in. Any NetScaler Console VM or Agent VM will proxy the licensing to the designated License Server Agent, (including the built-in agent) and another Agent can be promoted to the LSA at anytime the first is missing for NetScaler Console Service. The problem is you would need to change the license server IP manually. As you stated, the device is already rebooted and not licensed, so pointing it to a new agent/LSA and rebooting should not cause an issue. If you already have the Agents or Local Consoles setup in HA, you should be able to point any NetScaler that is rebooted to the running Agent/Console and reboot, still negating the need for "HA" licensing. The biggest pain in my view on any of this right now is the very possible loss of configuration/certificates during the brief "unlicensed" period. All of this has been brought to the attention of the product team and I am hopeful they are working on better processes to make licensing easier and less obtrusive.

Now I have a couple of HA pairs that have lost their capacity, but apparently they should work unless they’re rebooted. Does the same apply for the appliances running on grace but still have time left?

AFAIK licensing changes do not apply unless rebooted. But, I know you can change capacity on the fly, so I am unsure. The log files and dashboard should show if the licensed capacity is exceeded.

That seems to be the case and it was confirmed by support as well. In case that we lose the licensing for some reason, it really doesn't matter if we have grace left or not, the end result is the same if the appliance reboots

Yep. Multi-tenant is not setup right. We have the same issue.