Q&A about how Swarm licensing works.
Q: How is Swarm licensed?
A: Swarm is licensed by physically used storage after protection. It does NOT include trapped space or unused space, but it does include ALL live data (ie all versions).
Example 1: if you have 20TB of data using 2x replicas, that is consuming 40TB of physical space, so 40TB of the license
Example 2: If you have 20TB of data using EC4:2 that is using 30TB of physical space, so 30TB of license.
Q: Can you have a license that is smaller. or larger, that the total storage available in the cluster?
A: Yes. In fact it is good practise to have slightly more physical space available than licensed space to cover for trapped space and other overhead
Q: What happen if I write more data than the license allows?
A: You will be unable to write any new data, including modifying existing data or metadata.
You will however be able to continue reading existing data.
Note. You will be unable to login to the cluster via the StorageUI, as this requires the access token to be written to the cluster
Q: Does a license update require a reboot?
A: No. The license file is updated in the CSN/SCS, and the storage nodes check this every 15 minutes and apply changes automatically.
Q: What happens if the Swarm Term license is expired?
A: When the license expires, new client writes are disallowed but the cluster allows reads.
Q: - What happens if the License URL is not reachable?
A: If a node has fetched a valid license, it will keep using it.