How to Install RLKS 9.0 on a Windows Platform

Authors: Randy Langehennig, Andrew Moynahan

Date: 07/27/2023, v1.0

Overview

This document is meant to provide guidance on how to do a basic RLKS 9.0 installation on a Windows platform.   The new thing about the 9.0 release is that there is not a GUI when you install the software.   You will use the command line to start/stop/validate that licenses are being served properly.

The instructions will walk you through the download from IBM Fix Central all the way to validating the keys are being served up properly.

Downloading RLKS 9.0 for Windows

You can download RLKS 9.0 for the Windows platform from IBM Fix Central.  Follow these instructions:

1.        1. Navigate to IBM Fix Central in your web browser.

2.        2. In the Find product tab, enter “IBM Common Licensing” as your product selector as shown below:

  3. For the Installed Version, select 9.0 as shown above.

2.        4. For the Platform, select Windows, Window 32-bit or Windows 64-bit.  They all go to the same place.

3.        5. Click Continue (as shown above)

  6. On the next page that appears, select “Show fixes that get me to this version (9.0) as shown below:

2.       7. Click Continue

3.       8. The list that appears will include approximately 11 options.   The package to download is “IBM License Key Server 90” as shown below:

           9. Check the checkbox next to “IBM License Key Server 90” and click Continue

2.       10. For the download, choose the “IBM_License_Key_Server_Windows.zip” file as shown below to begin the download:

1.       11. You can place the downloaded ZIP file on your Windows system in a location of your choice as shown below:

2.       12. Extract the zip and you are ready for the next section to perform the install.

Installing RLKS 9.0 on a Windows Platform

Now that the RLKS 9.0 installation files are downloaded to your Windows system, we can now start the installation.  The installation really is straight forward and simple.  I recommend that you run the installer as an Administrator.   Follow these steps:

    1.  In your Windows Explorer, navigate to your extracted install folder which should be labeled “IBM_License_Key_Server_Windows”.

1.          2. You should see these two sub-folders (LKS_MASTER_DISK, LKSSERVER) as shown below:

2.         3. Navigate to the LKS_MASTER_DISK folder

3.        4. You will find a launchpad.bat file as shown below:

          5.  Right click and select "Run as administrator" as shown above

          6. The “IBM Common Licensing” Installer GUI will appear as shown below:

          7. Click on “Install IBM License Key Server” as highlighted above.  You will see this:

2.        8. Click on “Install IBM License Key Server” in the right-hand pane as shown above.  This will start the IBM Installation Manager.

3.       9. Eventually, you will find that this dialog will appear:

1.       10. Click the Next button

2.       11. The License Agreement page will appear as shown below:

1.       12. Select “I accept” from the choice selection as shown above and click Next

         13. The Install Packages page will appear.   I took the defaults for the shared resources and installation manager directory as shown below:

1.       14. Click Next

2.       15. On the next page, you choose the Installation Directory for your RLKS 9.0 installation.  I took the default as shown below:

1.       16. Click Next

2.       17. The Summary page will appear as shown below:

 18. Click Install

2.       19. The progress bar will indicate your progress with the installation as shown below:

1.       20. You should see this page when the installation completes:

2.       21. Click Finish

3.       22. You can close the IBM Common Licensing install GUI as shown below by clicking the close button at the top right.

 Your installation is complete.  Move to the next section to import your keys and start the Rational License Key Server (RLKS).

Importing your new License Keys and Starting the RLKS

With the RLKS 9.0 release, there is not a program you can start from the Start menu which will allow you to import your license keys and show them in a GUI.   You will have to do this from a command line much like you would on a Linux host.  

Follow these steps:

1.        1. In a Windows Explorer, navigate to your RLKS 9.0 installation root directory.  In my case, it is C:\Program Files (x86)\IBM\LKS\bin as shown below:

2.       

          2. If you have a set of temporary keys, you can copy the values as you see below:

1.        3. Using Notepad or another program of your choice, paste this values to the bottom of the LKS_License.dat file as shown below:

2.       4. Save your changes to the LKS_License.dat file

3.       5. Open a Command Prompt window and be sure to run as Administrator

4.       6. Change directory to C:\Program Files(x86)\IBM\LKS\bin folder

5.       7. Run the ‘startLKS.bat’ script in the command prompt to start the RLKS daemon as shown below:

  8. Run the ‘lmutil lmstat -a -c 27000@localhost’ command to see what licenses are being served up and confirm your licenses are shown as you see here:

You are done!   You can now configure your solutions to point to this instance of the Rational License Key Server so the application can have licenses enabled to support the work it needs to perform.

Conclusion

Installing Rational License Key Server (RLKS) 9.0 on a Windows or Linux platform is not a difficult task as you can conclude from reading this blog.  This software is vital to provide licensing for IBM DevOps offerings like UrbanCode Deploy, UrbanCode Release, ClearQuest, and many other tools. 

This blog was meant to provide some basic instruction, however, you can do much more with the solution including setting up a triad of RLKS servers for high availability. 

Special thanks to Andrew Moynahan who helped me with a Windows instance to create this blog.