License rent for CHR

RouterOS Virtualization
1

Is it possible to rent a license for CHR?
In case - I have a customer, who needs a instance of CHR in our public cloud.
Can I temporarily grant him a full-featured license with the option to revoke it up at the end of the lease term?

Sorry for my poor english, it’s not my native lang

2

Did you check here https://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:CHR#CHR_Licensing ?

3

they are only perpetual!

4

not shure which license do you have in mind ? … renting ?! … interesting !
guess you’re burning more money to setup the rental-contract and keep your related paperwork tidy, than the license would cost you.
but sometimes business-ways are mysterious ways … ?! so … do it the scottish way: reset the config of the VM to default after the “lease-time”, make a backup and rent it to the next customer :open_mouth:
… if there’s no next customer, put it on an usb-stick and as an ace in the hole, reuse it as a christmas gift for your nephew ?!
( you see … the oportunities for savings with a MTik-CHR-license are shoreless ! )
:slight_smile:

5

… A A N N D D … by the way
there is a 60 day grace period for every CHR-VM … fully featured … so if you do it the very scottish way … :
you rent this one to your customer and after that you can use the money for your nephews christmas CHR … so you can pour yourself an extra bottle eggnog for the savings !?
… S H O R E L E S S ! !

6

I know it, but this is not an option in my case. I’m asking about legal option of renting for a longer than a 2 months period.
What I mean by “license lease”: as an organization, I purchase a certain number of licenses. My clients (those who do not want to do licensing themselves) request a license from me for the duration of the CHR-VM lease. In other words, the license under the agreement belongs to me, and the client gets it for temporary use.

Is it possible to use licenses in this way?

7

Mikrotik itself does not provide any “leasing” ability, but you can do it as you described:

  • You own perpetual licence, which is bound to your mikrotik account.
  • You install customer’s CHR and assign the licence to it. Unfortunately this requires the CHR to be assigned to your account, but that can be changed later by generating new ID. Also, it does not give you any access to the CHR. It is purely licencing.
  • customer pay rental fees to you
  • once term is up, you have two choices:
  1. you log into the CHR and generate new ID (that way it will lose the licence), but customer might still get previous ID back by restoring backup of VM)
  2. you go to web UI and deassign the licence (actually, you have to transfer it to different existing CHR - you can have few dummy CHR for “parking” unused licences), but that way, CHR stays assigned to your account (not really your concern if you delete/uninstall it later)

If the customer does not mind that the CHR will be licenced under your account, this might work.
Remember - licence is bound to a mikrotik account. There is no way to “temporary” lease the licence to a different mikrotik account in a official way.

8

At post #2 that i posted the link with the Wiki, clearly mentions It is possible to transfer a perpetual license to another CHR instance

9

Well, nobody says otherwise :smiley: I literary confirmed the same.
Also I gave an example how it would look if OP wanted to make it look like “lease” and I mentioned possible troubles which came into my mind. But the whole idea is clearly based on transfer of the perpetual licence between different CHRs

EDIT: maybe you misread my warning about licence being bound to ACCOUNT? Well, that does not change. It is transferable between CHRs but not transferable between accounts. And CHR has to be assigned to the same account as the licence. You can’t have CHR without account or with Account A, with a licence from Account B.