Moving a Cloud Installation from By the Hour (BTH) to Bring Your Own License (BYOL)

Vertica offers two licensing options for some of the entries in the Amazon Web Services Marketplace and Google Cloud Marketplace:

  • Bring Your Own License (BYOL): a long-term license that you obtain through an online licensing portal. These deployments also work with a free Community Edition license. Vertica uses a community license automatically if you do not install a license that you purchased. (For more about Vertica licenses, see Managing Licenses and Understanding Vertica Licenses.)

  • Vertica by the Hour (BTH): a pay-as-you-go environment where you are charged an hourly fee for both the use of Vertica and the cost of the instances it runs on. The Vertica by the hour deployment offers an alternative to purchasing a term license. If you want to crunch large volumes of data within a short period of time, this option might work better for you. The BTH license is automatically applied to all clusters you create using a BTH MC instance.

If you start out with an hourly license, you can later decide to use a long-term license for your database. The support for an hourly versus a long-term license is built into the instances running your database. To move your database from an hourly license to a long-term license, you must create a new database cluster with a new set of instances.

To move from an hourly to a long-term license, follow these steps:

  1. Purchase a BYOL license. Follow the process described in Obtaining a License Key File.
  2. Apply the new license to your database.
  3. Shut down your database.
  4. Create a new database cluster using a BYOL marketplace entry.
  5. Revive your database onto the new cluster.

The exact steps you must take depend on your database mode and your preferred tool for managing your database: 

Moving an Eon Mode Database from BTH to BYOL Using the Command Line

Follow these steps to move an Eon Mode database from an hourly to a long-term license.

  1. Obtain a long-term BYOL license from the online licensing portal, described in Obtaining a License Key File.
  2. Upload the license file to a node in your database. Note the absolute path in the node's filesystem, as you will need this later when installing the license.
  3. Connect to the node you uploaded the license file to in the previous step.

  4. Connect to your database using vsql and view the licenses table:

    => SELECT * FROM licenses;

    Note the name of the hourly license listed in the NAME column, so you can check if it is still present later.

  5. Install the license in the database using the INSTALL_LICENSE function with the absolute path to the license file you uploaded in step 2:

    => SELECT install_license('absolute path to BYOL license');

  6. View the licenses table again:

    => SELECT * FROM licenses;

    If only the new BYOL license appears in the table, skip to step 8. If the hourly license whose name you noted in step 4 is still in the table, copy the name and proceed to step 7.

  7. Call the DROP_LICENSE function to drop the hourly license:

    => SELECT drop_license('hourly license name');

  8. You will need the path for your cluster's communal storage in a later step. If you do not already know the path, you can find this information by executing this query:

    => SELECT location_path FROM V_CATALOG.STORAGE_LOCATIONS 
       WHERE sharing_type = 'COMMUNAL';
  9. Synchronize your database's metadata. See Synchronizing Metadata.

  10. Shut down the database by calling the SHUTDOWN function:

    => SELECT SHUTDOWN();

  11. You now need to create a new BYOL cluster onto which you will revive your database. Deploy a new cluster including a new MC instance using a BYOL entry in the marketplace of your chosen cloud platform. See:

    Your new BYOL cluster must have the same number of primary nodes as your existing hourly license cluster.

  12. Revive your database onto the new cluster. For instructions, see Reviving an Eon Mode Database Cluster. Because you created the new cluster using a BYOL entry in the marketplace, the database uses the BYOL you applied earlier.

  13. After reviving the database on your new BYOL cluster, terminate the instances for your hourly license cluster and MC. For instructions, see your cloud provider's documentation.

Moving an Eon Mode Database from BTH to BYOL Using the MC

Follow this procedure to move to BYOL and revive your database using MC:

  1. Purchase a long-term BYOL license from the online licensing portal, following the steps detailed in Obtaining a License Key File. Save the file to a location on your computer.
  2. You now need to install the new license on your database. Log into MC and click your database in the Recent Databases list.
  3. At the bottom of your database's Overview page, click the License tab.
  4. Under the Installed Licenses list, note the name of the BTH license in the License Name column. You will need this later to check whether it is still present after installing the new long-term license.
  5. In the ribbon at the top of the License History page, click the Install New License button. The Settings: License page opens.
  6. Click the Browse button next to the Upload a new license box.
  7. Locate the license file you obtained in step 1, and click Open.
  8. Click the Apply button on the top right of the page.
  9. Select the checkbox to agree to the EULA terms and click OK.
  10. After Vertica installs the license, click the Close button.
  11. Click the License tab at the bottom of the page.
  12. If only the new long-term license appears in the Installed Licenses list, skip to Step 16. If the by-the-hour license also appears in the list, copy down its name from the License Name column.
  13. You must drop the by-the-hour license before you can proceed. At the bottom of the page, click the Query Execution tab.

  14.  In the query editor, enter the following statement:

    SELECT DROP_LICENSE('hourly license name');
  15. Click Execute Query. The query should complete indicating that the license has been dropped.

  16. You will need the path for your cluster's communal storage in a later step. If you do not already know the path, you can find this information by executing this query in the Query Execution tab:

    SELECT location_path FROM V_CATALOG.STORAGE_LOCATIONS 
       WHERE sharing_type = 'COMMUNAL';
  17. Synchronize your database's metadata. See Synchronizing Metadata.
  18. You must now stop your by-the-hour database cluster. At the bottom of the page, click the Manage tab.
  19. In the banner at the top of the page, click Stop Database and then click OK to confirm.
  20. From the Amazon Web Services Marketplace or the Google Cloud Marketplace, deploy a new Vertica Management Console using a BYOL entry. Do not deploy a full cluster. You just need an MC deployment.
  21. Log into your new MC instance and revive the database. See Reviving an Eon Mode Database on AWS in MC for detailed instructions.
  22. After reviving the database on your new environment, terminate the instances for your hourly license environment. To do so, on the AWS CloudFormation Stacks page, select the hourly environment's stack (its collection of AWS resources) and click Actions > Delete Stack.

Moving an Enterprise Mode Database from Hourly to BYOL Using Backup and Restore

Currently, AWS is the only platform supported for Enterprise Mode databases using hourly licenses.

In an Enterprise Mode database, follow this procedure to move to BYOL, and then back up and restore your database:

  1. Obtain a long-term BYOL license from the online licensing portal, described in Obtaining a License Key File.
  2. Upload the license file to a node in your database. Note the absolute path in the node's filesystem, as you will need this later when installing the license.
  3. Connect to the node you uploaded the license file to in the previous step.

  4. Connect to your database using vsql and view the licenses table:

    => SELECT * FROM licenses;

    Note the name of the hourly license listed in the NAME column, so you can check if it is still present later.

  5. Install the license in the database using the INSTALL_LICENSE function with the absolute path to the license file you uploaded in step 2:

    => SELECT install_license('absolute path to BYOL license');

  6. View the licenses table again:

    => SELECT * FROM licenses;

    If only the new BYOL license appears in the table, skip to step 8. If the hourly license whose name you noted in step 4 is still in the table, copy the name and proceed to step 7.

  7. Call the DROP_LICENSE function to drop the hourly license:

    => SELECT drop_license('hourly license name');
  8. Back up the database. See Backing Up and Restoring the Database.
  9. Deploy a new cluster for your database using one of the BYOL entries in the Amazon Web Services Marketplace.
  10. Restore the database from the backup you created earlier. See Backing Up and Restoring the Database. When you restore the database, it will use the BYOL you loaded earlier.
  11. After restoring the database on your new environment, terminate the instances for your hourly license environment. To do so, on the AWS CloudFormation Stacks page, select the hourly environment's stack (its collection of AWS resources) and click Actions > Delete Stack.

After completing one of these procedures, see Viewing Your License Status to confirm the license drop and install were successful.