Hosted Altair Units (HAU)

Altair provides a cloud-based license server solution known as Hosted Altair Units (HAU). This allows customers to use either/or a traditional on-premise license server or an Altair hosted server managed via Altair One. Altair One is Altair’s global customer portal.

Hosted Altair Units (HAU) is a cloud-based licensing system. As long as you have internet access, the hosted units can be used to run all applications. There is no VPN necessary.

A client computer and/or individual user is authorized to use an accounts license. Typically, an individual user will authorize their own machine and user/login account. A single machine that is shared by multiple users may either have multiple authorizations for each user or if done by an admin, a single machine can have ALL users authorized.

The primary differences between these two authorization schemes are for accounting and management purposes. If an individual authorizes a machine, that machine may be de-authorized just for that individual, leaving other users authorized. When the machine uses a ‘system wide’ authorization, the entire machine may be de-authorized by simply de-authorizing the system wide authorization.

The primary use case for a system wide authorization is for compute clusters. It is not known at authorization time what machines in the cluster a particular user may end up on at run-time, and so on. So, the admin authorizes the entire machine for all users. The usage .log files will still record the username, but the authorization will be for all users.

Set up the HAU System

In order to use the HAU system you must first have a valid Altair One user account, and your account (your company's account) must have purchased and enabled Hosted Units. Check with your administrator if needed.

Once you have a valid Altair One account, you should be able to see the HAU or Hosted Units from the dashboard available from the Manage License menu in Altair One. There are both administrative functions (if you are one of your company's designated admins) and user functions. This section will cover the typical user functions. The two main functions are authorizing a machine to use HAU and checking on current usage.

In order to utilize the HAU system and your purchased units, each machine you wish to use your units from must be authorized prior to running any client applications. This can be done in two different ways. The default method to access an Altair license is directly from the application License Setup dialog available in HyperWorks, the Inspire Suite, SimLab, and SimSolid. For other applications, the Altair License Utility is used.

Access HAU from the License Setup Dialog

  1. Open the License Setup dialog using one of the following options:
    • If you have not already configured your license, this dialog will display automatically when you start the application.
    • If this is not the case, navigate to File > Licensing.


      Figure 1.
  2. In the License Setup dialog, fill in your Altair One credentials (Username and Password) under the Hosted on Altair One section.


    Figure 2. License Setup Dialog
  3. Click Activate.

Access HAU from the Altair License Utility

Note: If you have HyperWorks, any product of the Inspire Suite, SimLab, or SimSolid installed on your machine you should use the method described in the previous section (License Setup dialog).
  1. Login to Altair One.
  2. Go to the User Profile section of the Altair One Admin portal:
    https://admin.altairone.com/updateprofile
  3. Switch to the Authorized Machines tab.


    Figure 3.
  4. In the top-right corner, click Generate Auth Code.


    Figure 4.
  5. Click the Copy icon.


    Figure 5.
  6. Start the Altair License Utility.
    1. On Windows, this is located in the start menu under Altair 2021.2.

      You can also start it directly from:

      <ALTAIR_INSTALL_PATH>\security\bin\win64\gui\almutil_gui.exe (usually C:\Program Files\Altair\2021.2\security\bin\win64\gui\almutil_gui.exe).

    2. On Linux, you can start it directly from:

      <ALTAIR_INSTALL_PATH>/altair/security/bin/linux64/gui (by default /root/2021.2/altair/security/bin/linux64/gui).

  7. Click the Hosted HWU tab.
  8. In the Authorization section, paste your authentication code into the Authorization token field.
  9. Click Authorize.


    Figure 6.
    A message will indicated that the authorization was successful.


    Figure 7.
  10. Click OK.
  11. Close the Altair License Manager Utility.
Important: If you have ALTAIR_LICENSE_FILE set or a local, nodelocked license file in the default security location, then those will be used first before trying HAU. If you would like to change that, set ALM_HHWU=T in your environment variables. This will tell the client to not try using LM-X first, and only use HAU. In contrast, if you set ALM_HHWU=F, then you will get just the opposite. Clients will only use LM-X and not use HAU even if authorized. If not set at all, then the default is to try LM-X then HAU. You cannot change that order.

HAU System Advanced Settings

There are many advanced settings that may be useful for using the HAU system. Many consist of setting environment variables to change behavior or running almutil to change settings.

If you have a shared home directory on multiple machines, you may have multiple config files. Each one will be in a separate directory under .altair_licensing in your home directory.

Location of the HAU config file on supported platforms is as follows:

(~ is your home directory and HOSTNAME will be replaced with the actual HOSTNAME of each system authorized)
Platform
Default Location
Windows
C:\Users\<USERNAME>\AppData\.altiar_licensing\<HOSTNAME>\altair_hostedhwu.cfg
Linux
~/.altair_licensing/<HOSTNAME>/altair_hostedhwu.cfg

Valid Environment Variables for Controlling Licensing Behavior

Name Possible Settings
ALM_HHWU Controls where the application will search for licenses. Unset, the application will try On-Premises server then HAU (if the machine is authorized). Set to “T” will only use HAU. Set to “F” will only use On-Premises Server.
ALM_HHWU_CONFIG Overrides the default directory for storing the HAU config file.
ALM_HHWU_USE_WININET

(Windows Only)

 The default proxy information (if required) is stored in the HAU config file. Setting this variable to “T” allows the applications to use the Windows Global proxy settings and supports interactive password prompts, and so on. Recommended only for GUI applications. Batch (solvers) should not have this set in their environments.
ALTAIR_LICENSE_PATH Set to point to On-Premises license server or NodeLocked license. Do not set if you only want to use HAU.
In order to use a Proxy Server with HAU you can use almutil to set the appropriate settings. Open a command shell and execute almutil with the appropriate options to setup the Proxy according to your network configuration. The available options relevant to configurating HAU are shown below:
Usage: almutil [option]
-hhwuauth [-system -code <code>]
Authorize with the Hosted Altair Units system.
-system will set system-wide authorization.
-code the authorization code you receive from the web portal
-proxy [-system -host <host> -port <port> -user <user> -passwd <passwd>]
Configure proxy settings for use with the Hosted Altair Units system.
Optional parameters -host, -port, -user, and -passwd can be given on the command line.
The -passwd option can be given without an argument to avoid passing a password on the command line. In this case you will be prompted for input.
-system will configure the system wide proxy settings
You must be an administrator to use -system