license

Nomad Enterprise Licensing

Licensing capabilities were added to Nomad Enterprise v0.12.0. Each server in the cluster must have its own license. Nomad Enterprise can be downloaded from the releases site.

Click here to set up a demo of Nomad Enterprise or here for instructions on how to get a trial license.

Note: A Nomad Enterprise cluster cannot be downgraded to the open source version of Nomad. Servers running the open source version of Nomad will panic if they are joined to a Nomad Enterprise cluster. See issue gh-9958 for more details.

Expiring Licenses

Nomad Enterprise licenses have an expiration time and a termination time. You can read the license on a server with the nomad license get command:

$ nomad license get
Product        = nomad
License Status = valid
License ID     = eaaecbd5-b598-4fa4-b649-bb234bf49fa3
Customer ID    = ae94bdd0-39bf-4c58-bf80-8a9468b0467c
Issued At      = 2021-03-29 14:47:29.024191 -0400 EDT
Expires At     = 2021-03-29 20:47:29.024191 -0400 EDT
Datacenter     = *
Modules:
        governance-policy
        multicluster-and-efficiency
Licensed Features:
        Automated Upgrades
        Enhanced Read Scalability
        Redundancy Zones
        Namespaces
        Resource Quotas
        Audit Logging
        Sentinel Policies
        Multiregion Deployments
        Automated Backups
        Multi-Vault Namespaces
        Dynamic Application Sizing

As a Nomad Enterprise license approaches its expiration time, Nomad servers will periodically log a warning message about the approaching expiration. Below shows log excerpts of the warnings.

    2021-03-29T15:02:28.100-0400 [WARN]  nomad.licensing: license expiring: time_left=5m0s
    2021-03-29T15:03:28.103-0400 [WARN]  nomad.licensing: license expiring: time_left=4m0s
    2021-03-29T15:04:28.106-0400 [WARN]  nomad.licensing: license expiring: time_left=3m0s
    2021-03-29T15:05:28.109-0400 [WARN]  nomad.licensing: license expiring: time_left=2m0s
    2021-03-29T15:06:28.112-0400 [WARN]  nomad.licensing: license expiring: time_left=1m0s
    2021-03-29T15:07:28.114-0400 [WARN]  nomad.licensing: license expiring: time_left=0s
    2021-03-29T15:07:58.104-0400 [ERROR] nomad.licensing: license expired, please update license: error="invalid license or license is expired"

When the license reaches the termination time, enterprise functionality will become limited. Only read operations on enterprise endpoints will be supported, and write operations will return an error.

Note that if the server is restarted with a terminated license, it will immediately stop.

Configuring the License

See the server license configuration reference documentation on all the options to set an enterprise license. Nomad will load the license file from disk or environment when it starts.

Note: An Enterprise license tutorial is available to help you install the license on the server.

In order to immediately alert operators of a bad configuration setting, if a license configuration option is an invalid or expired license, the Nomad server will exit with an error.

NOMAD_LICENSE=misconfigured nomad agent -dev
==> No configuration files loaded
==> Starting Nomad agent...
==> Error starting agent: server setup failed: failed to initialize enterprise licensing: a file license was configured but the license is invalid: error decoding version: expected integer

See the License commands for more information on interacting with the Enterprise License.