About License Manager

Windows

License Manager lets you subscribe, manage, and track third-party license usage on Google Cloud. As an administrator, you can use License Manager to assign and monitor per-user licensing products, such as Microsoft Office, on virtual machines (VMs).

How License Manager works

License Manager uses two main components to authenticate, activate, and monitor per-user licenses on your virtual machines:

The license configuration, which stores the licensed application details, region, and number of authorized licenses.
The License Manager agent, which activates the software directly with the third-party vendor from your virtual machine (VM) instance. Some third-party licenses depend on user access counts over a given period. The agent also verifies the number of consumed licenses from your license configuration.

In the License Manager dashboard, you can view active licenses across your organization and adjust monthly license counts.

Supported licensing products

License Manager supports the following products:

Limitations

License Manager has the following limitations:

License Manager is available on Compute Engine and Google Cloud VMware Engine, but individual licensing products might be available on only one platform. For more information about platform support for each product, refer to its specific documentation.
Logging is available only for VMs running on Compute Engine; it isn't supported for Google Cloud VMware Engine instances.
License Manager supports a default limit of 5,000 licenses per license configuration. To request a quota increase, contact license-manager-onboarding@google.com.
License Manager supports one license configuration per product per region. You can't create multiple license configurations for the same product in the same region.
License Manager is supported in the following regions:
- africa-south1
- asia-east1
- asia-east2
- asia-northeast1
- asia-northeast3
- asia-south1
- asia-southeast1
- australia-southeast1
- australia-southeast2
- europe-north1
- europe-west1
- europe-west2
- europe-west3
- europe-west4
- me-central1
- me-west1
- northamerica-northeast1
- southamerica-east1
- southamerica-west1
- us-central1
- us-east1
- us-east4
- us-south1
- us-west2
If your target region is not listed, contact license-manager-onboarding@google.com.

Get started with License Manager

To use licenses managed by License Manager, do the following:

Enable the License Manager API
Create a license configuration
Install and activate the License Manager agent on a VM

Before you begin

To get the permissions that you need to get started with License Manager, ask your administrator to grant you the following IAM roles on your project:

Service Usage Admin (roles/serviceusage.serviceUsageAdmin)
License Manager Admin (roles/licensemanager.admin)

For more information about granting roles, see Manage access to projects, folders, and organizations.

You might also be able to get the required permissions through custom roles or other predefined roles.

Enable the License Manager API

To enable the License Manager API, do the following:

In the Google Cloud console, go to the APIs & Services page.

Go to the APIs & Services page
Click Enable APIs & Services.
Search for and select License Manager API with the service name licensemanager.googleapis.com.
Click Enable.

Create a license configuration

For some licensing products, your billing obligation begins immediately when you create the license configuration. For information about product billing considerations, see Supported licensing products.

To create a license configuration by using the Google Cloud console, do the following:

Open the License Manager page in the Google Cloud console.

Go to the License Manager page
Click Create License Configuration.
Enter a Name for your configuration.
Select a Location for your configuration.
Choose the Product you want to associate with the license. For an up-to-date list of supported products, see Supported licensing products. Note that you can create only one license configuration per product per region.
Enter the total Number of Licenses you want to enable.
Select the confirmation checkbox to verify your entered information.
Click Create to finalize your license configuration.

Install and activate the License Manager agent

Each VM using a license managed by License Manager requires the License Manager agent to authenticate and activate software.

To install and activate the License Manager agent, open PowerShell as an administrator on your VM and do the following:

Add the googet repository:

googet addrepo google-cloud-license-manager-agent https://packages.cloud.google.com/yuck/repos/google-cloud-license-manager-agent-windows-x86_64

Install the License Manager agent:

googet install google-cloud-license-manager-agent

Configure the agent:

Installing the agent creates a directory at C:\Program Files\Google\google-cloud-license-manager-agent. To specify the products to activate, edit the configuration file located at conf\configuration.json.

For VMware Engine, specify the vcenter_domain property with your vCenter FQDN (for example, "vcenter_domain": "vcenter.example.com").

The following is an example configuration file for activating Microsoft Office 2024 Professional Plus:

{
  "log_level": "INFO",
  "log_to_cloud": true,
  "products":
    [
      {
        "name": "Office2024ProfessionalPlus",
        "source_path": "C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft Office"
      }
    ]
}

The following table describes the properties in the configuration.json file:

Property	Type	Description
`log_level`	String	Logging verbosity: `DEBUG`, `WARNING`, `ERROR`, or `INFO`. Default is `INFO`.
`log_to_cloud`	Boolean	Enables export to Cloud Logging. Default is `false`.
`products[].name`	String	Supported products: `Office2021ProfessionalPlus`, `Office2024ProfessionalPlus`.
`products[].source_path`	String	Installation directory path (for example, `C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office`).

If you set "log_to_cloud": true, ensure you complete the following Cloud Logging prerequisites:

Enable the Cloud Logging API (logging.googleapis.com) in your project.
Grant your virtual machines access to the Cloud Logging API.
Grant the VM service account the Logs Writer role (roles/logging.logWriter).

If your VM uses multiple products managed by License Manager, add an entry for each product to the products list.

To verify that the configuration file is formatted correctly, run the validate_config command:

& 'C:\Program Files\Google\google-cloud-license-manager-agent\google-cloud-license-manager-agent.exe' validate_config

To apply your changes, restart the agent service:

Restart-Service -Name 'google-cloud-license-manager-agent' -Force

To activate your product (for example, Office2024ProfessionalPlus or Office2021ProfessionalPlus), run the following command:
```
& 'C:\Program Files\Google\google-cloud-license-manager-agent\google-cloud-license-manager-agent.exe' activate Office2024ProfessionalPlus
```
Microsoft requires Office LTSC licenses to activate over the internet directly with Microsoft servers. Ensure the VM has outbound internet access during activation.

To verify that activation was successful, open any Microsoft Office application on your VM, click File > Account, and verify that the status displays Product Activated.

Migrate from Office LTSC 2021 to Office LTSC 2024

To migrate an existing VM from Microsoft Office LTSC 2021 to Office LTSC 2024, do the following:

Create a license configuration for Microsoft Office LTSC 2024 Professional Plus in the Google Cloud console in the same region as your VM.

To deactivate Office LTSC 2021, open PowerShell as an administrator on your VM and run the following command:

& 'C:\Program Files\Google\google-cloud-license-manager-agent\google-cloud-license-manager-agent.exe' deactivate Office2021ProfessionalPlus

To deploy Office LTSC 2024, follow Microsoft's deployment guide for Office LTSC 2024.
To update the License Manager agent, run the following command:
```
googet update google-cloud-license-manager-agent
```

To replace Office2021ProfessionalPlus with Office2024ProfessionalPlus, edit the configuration file located at C:\Program Files\Google\google-cloud-license-manager-agent\conf\configuration.json:

{
  "log_level": "INFO",
  "log_to_cloud": true,
  "products":
    [
      {
        "name": "Office2024ProfessionalPlus",
        "source_path": "C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft Office"
      }
    ]
}

To verify that the configuration file is formatted correctly, run the validate_config command:

& 'C:\Program Files\Google\google-cloud-license-manager-agent\google-cloud-license-manager-agent.exe' validate_config

To apply your changes, restart the agent service:

Restart-Service -Name 'google-cloud-license-manager-agent' -Force

To activate Office LTSC 2024, run the following command:

& 'C:\Program Files\Google\google-cloud-license-manager-agent\google-cloud-license-manager-agent.exe' activate Office2024ProfessionalPlus

To verify that activation was successful, open any Microsoft Office application on your VM, click File > Account, and verify that the status displays Product Activated.

Manage your licenses

After creating a license configuration, you can adjust license volume or deactivate the configuration. Deactivated license configurations remain visible for 90 days before permanent deletion. You can reactivate within that period.

Increase or decrease your license count

Some licenses are billed by the calendar month in which they are active. License volume increases take effect immediately. Decreases or deactivations take effect in the next calendar month. For information about how each license is billed, see Supported licensing products.

To change the total license count for a license configuration, do the following:

Open the License Manager page in the Google Cloud console.

Go to the License Manager page
On the license configuration that you want to modify, to show additional options, click Actions.
Click Edit License Volume.
Enter the new license volume amount.
Click Confirm to apply the updated volume.

Deactivate a license configuration

When you no longer require licenses in a particular region, you can deactivate the license configuration. Deactivated configurations display the Inactive status and remain visible for 90 days before deletion.

To deactivate a license configuration, do the following:

Open the License Manager page in the Google Cloud console.

Go to the License Manager page
On the license configuration that you want to deactivate, to show additional options, click Actions.
Click Deactivate License Configuration.
Click Confirm to deactivate the license configuration.

Reactivate a license configuration

To reactivate a deactivated license configuration, do the following:

Open the License Manager page in the Google Cloud console.

Go to the License Manager page
On the license configuration that you want to reactivate, to show additional options, click Actions.
Click Reactivate License Configuration.
Click Confirm to reactivate the configuration.

License configurations that were previously active in the current calendar month default to the previous license count. Otherwise, the reactivated license configuration defaults to a license count of 0. To adjust the license count after reactivation, see Increase or decrease your license count.

Uninstall the License Manager agent

To begin uninstallation, you must first deactivate your licensing products:

In a Powershell terminal with Administrator mode, use the deactivatecommand to deactivate the product:

& 'C:\Program Files\Google\google-cloud-license-manager-agent\google-cloud-license-manager-agent.exe' deactivate Office2021ProfessionalPlus

Uninstall the agent with the following command:

googet clean
googet remove google-cloud-license-manager-agent

Review agent logs

The License Manager agent supports both local logging on the VM and cloud logging with Cloud Logging in the Google Cloud console.

View local logs

Local logs are stored on the VM in C:\Program Files\Google\google-cloud-license-manager-agent\logs.

Each log file has a maximum size of 25 MB before the agent creates a new log file. The agent retains up to three log files and automatically deletes the oldest file when this limit is reached.

View Cloud Logging logs

If cloud logging is enabled ("log_to_cloud": true), you can view agent logs in the Google Cloud console by doing the following:

Open the Logs Explorer page in the Google Cloud console.

Go to the Logs Explorer page
Click All Resources.
In the menu, click GCP Location, and then click Global.
Click Apply.
In the query editor, enter google-cloud-license-manager-agent.
Click Run query.

Logs generated by agent instances running across your VMs appear in the results list. To filter logs for a specific VM, use the query filters available in the interface.

Create a service perimeter for License Manager

VPC Service Controls helps mitigate data exfiltration risks from your Google-managed services.

With VPC Service Controls, you can configure service perimeters around the resources of your Google-managed services and control the movement of data across the perimeter boundary.

To create a service perimeter, see the VPC Service Controls guide to creating a service perimeter.

To protect License Manager, add the following APIs to the service perimeter:

License Manager API (licensemanager.googleapis.com)
Cloud Logging API (logging.googleapis.com)
Compute Engine API (compute.googleapis.com)
Agent Communication API (agentcommunication.googleapis.com)

Your service perimeter must include all of these services for the License Manager agent to work with VPC Service Controls.