Will production licenses be affected if we restore a backup copy of our production Qlik Sense Enterprise server to separate VM for testing?

[kwdaniels]

We're running Qlik Sense Enterprise February 2020 on an AWS VM and would like to upgrade to the latest available version. Before we do this, we would like to test the upgrade process using a backup copy of the entire production VM restored to a separate VM.

We have previously restored a copy of the production VM to a separate VM and were able to access it without affecting user licenses on the production VM, though we shut down the restored copy after about an hour.

Our question is this: If we restore the production VM to a separate VM to perform upgrade testing and it takes more than a day to do the testing, will that interfere with licensing or user access on the production VM? We want to be sure we're not jeopardizing user access to our production Qlik Sense Enterprise system before we proceed down this path.

Note: We're using a signed license key with a combination of 200 professional licenses and 5000 analyzer capacity minutes. Only one, perhaps two, of us would be involved in the upgrade testing on the non-production, restored-from-backup VM.

[Ray_Strother]

Hello ,

1. Yes this will affected your license as with the SLk license, your users will sync up to the license server. 

2. You can request a temp license from your account manger for the purpose of testing.

3. Please review the below link on the SLK license.

Article link:

https://community.qlik.com/t5/Knowledge/Top-5-Things-to-Know-About-Modern-Qlik-Licensing/ta-p/171347...

[kwdaniels]

Thanks, Ray, this is helpful.

We actually do have an active "Qlik Sense Enterprise Additional Test Site Subscription" license but are not currently using it.

We are looking for the most straightforward path to test the upgrade process before upgrading in production. Since we don't have a parallel test environment set up, and since we are not confident we can easily configure an exactly parallel test environment from scratch, we would prefer to use an image of production to do our upgrade than to set up a test server from scratch.

After watching the video you referenced, I'm thinking we have two main options to accomplish this:

1) Upgrade to a recent version of Qlik (our current version is February 2020, which doesn't support delayed sync) on the restored image and then enable "delayed sync" based on our production SLK, turning off access to port 443

--OR--

2) Assign our "Qlik Sense Enterprise Additional Test Site Subscription" license to QSE on the restored image

Are both of these options feasible, given what we are trying to accomplish? Is one preferable to another? It seems option 2 would be simpler, but I have a concern: if we delete the image after we complete our upgrade testing, and then in a year from now we make another image from production, will we be able to use the same test license on that image that we used on the current image?