ArcGIS License Manager Failover

[Anonymous User]

I'm setting up license manager failover for my organization per the instructions found at http://resources.arcgis.com/en/help/install-guides/license-manager/10.2/index.html#//00790000000v000...

Acquired the failover licenses from our account rep and have everything setup. Trouble is, it doesn't seem to work as described. Instead of getting a notification when the primary manager is unreachable, everything appears to keep humming along. In the case of not having any licenses available (but Manager is still reachable), the client pulls from the failover Manager.

Anyone have experience setting up License Manager failover? It was great of ESRI to offer this and dole out the new licenses (which are clearly marked Failover Concurrent in My ESRI) and we don't want to abuse it or rely on our people to keep their hands out the cookie jar.

For reference:

ArcGIS Desktop & License Manager 10.3.1

Both primary and failover Managers installed on Windows Server 2008 systems

[curtvprice · Accepted solution]

Desktop clients (ArcMap etc) pick up a license on launch. After that, it does check to see if the license manager is available but will not fail-over if the license server goes down, it will give a timeout warning and eventually time out the license and force an app quit.

The fail over only happens on app startup, if the primary license server is not reachable.

If you want to see what's going on in detail, I suggest checking out the audit log:

Viewing the audit log—Help | ArcGIS for Desktop