we are facing the same problem as this post:
However, it was marked as resolved, but I feel that it leaves open questions and installing a license manager is not a good solution (as it was not required before).
Situation:
We license our Pro instances from AGOL and have not needed a License Manager for our 10.9.1 and 10.8.0 enterprise and portal deployments before.
It appears something has changed this year with obtaining a json file for portal licensing.
@MarleyGeddes Creator is not an option, only Viewer or GIS Professional Advanced, this is on step 2, and attempting to select neither fails.
If we select GIS Professional Advanced licenses, we are forced to select a license manager, and port and MAC address/cloud ID.
It doesn't seem like installing a License Manager should be the solution, as it hasn't been required before.
If you select the option to have a GIS Professional user type or an ArcGIS Pro license / extension in your Portal for ArcGIS license file, you will be required to set up a License Manager. Without a License Manager, you will not be able to pull a Pro license from your ArcGIS Enterprise Portal, thus making those licenses useless.
However, with that said, there are other licensing options for Pro. You can still pull a Pro license from AGOL account or use a Single Use license. Once Pro is authorized, you will be able to connect to your Enterprise Portal.
If you don't have any other user types in your ArcGIS Enterprise agreement other than GIS Professional, speak to your Customer Service Rep at Esri. They can help you get a Creator or other user type for your Enterprise Portal. Here's a link to the different user types:
>However, with that said, there are other licensing options for Pro. You can still pull a Pro license from AGOL account or use a Single Use license. Once Pro is authorized, you will be able to connect to your Enterprise Portal.
Yup, that's what we do.
>If you don't have any other user types in your ArcGIS Enterprise agreement other than GIS Professional, speak to your Customer Service Rep at Esri. They can help you get a Creator or other user type for your Enterprise Portal. Here's a link to the different user types:
Creator users are what we currently have, just need to renew the license. So you're saying contact Esri to bypass the user interface that doesn't give Creator as an option?
There isn't a way to bypass the user interface. If there is no Creator user type listed when creating a license, it is likely because you do not have one. If you are just renewing your Portal for ArcGIS license, try clicking the edit button on your old license instead and see if you can swap out the expiring Creator user types for new ones. I'm not sure if it will show up that way. If it doesn't show up, then you will need to contact your CSR. It could be that a mistake was made and you were provided with GIS Professional user types instead of Creator user types.
Thanks @JalesM we'll reach out to our Esri contact for our organization.