Connecting your Engineering Workstation to an Ansys Licensing Server

February 2, 2024 Dan Dart

Prerequisites:

  • Ansys Products are installed on your Workstation (as Administrator)
  • Ansys License Management Center is Installed on your Server or Workstation (as Administrator)
  • Incoming port 1055 (default) is open on the Server and Workstations.
  • If the License file was modified with an ansysmld static port (line 2 for example PORT=1056), this port must be open on the server for incoming connections, sometimes the workstation as well.
  • The three executables on the Server have incoming firewall exceptions – lmgrd, ansyslmd, ansysli_server
  • Your Server and Workstation are networked together and can ping one-another.

If any of the above items is not complete, please see the Rand Simulation Ansys Installation Guide

When the above prerequisites are complete, you can connect your Workstation to the Ansys License Server to check out licenses.  Here are the steps:

  1. Retrieve the Hostname of the server either from your IT, a command prompt or from the LM as described in this paper.
  2. Run the Licensing Settings Application on the Workstation via Right-Click>More>Run as Administrator
  3. Enter the server hostname into the Licensing Settings on each Workstation.
    1. In the below example the hostname ie Server 1 is entered as WIN371.
    2. If your workstation acts as the server, you would use the hostname of it
  4. Enter the port for the ansys lmgrd (by default it is 1055).  Note this is NOT the ansyslmd port.
  5. Click Test>Returns a Green Checkmark?  If Yes, then Click Save.  The configuration is complete.
  6. If an error occurs the most common issues are the Prerequisites are not Complete or There is a 3rd party software on your system such as Sentinel One, Cisco Endpoint, etc that may be blocking the traffic from the Workstation to the Server.  Another possibility is the Ansys software was installed while the security software was active and so it needs to be disabled temporarily to get a clean installation.

Getting into the Details:

Here is what the Server running Ansys Licensing Management Center icon will look like in the Windows Start Menu. If you have a dedicated Server for hosting licenses, ANSYS License Management Center will not be in use on Client Workstations.

The Ansys License Management Center Application, “LM” shown below, runs in a browser on the server.

In this example, you can see that when you click on Click on Get System Hostid Information, you can retrieve the HOSTNAME which is WIN371 for the Server.  For these instructions we will use that as the example Server hostname going forward.

Regardless of a Workstation or Server configuration, you will still connect the Workstation to either itself or to the Server by running the Ansys Licensing Settings Application “LS” as Administrator.  This application is found on each Client Workstation.  Enter the information as shown below, Click Test and you should get a Green Check mark confirming the connection to the server. 

Additional Information

Ping is an optional test to make sure that you are networked to the server.  If ping doesn’t return a reply, that part of the connection must be handled by your IT first as Rand Simulation and Ansys will not have authority, administrative access and possibility the capability to change your network setup.

In this example you would open command prompt and type ping WIN371 in order to check the connection to the Server.  It should reply with connection time details similar to this:

Another useful command is simply hostname

Type in hostname at the command prompt, then enter.  Either on the Server or the Workstation this will return the respective machine’s hostname.

About the Author

Dan Dart

Senior Support Engineer

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