Licensing challenges with Virtual Machines
Virtual Machine Detection, Prevention, and Licensing
Virtual Machines (VM) pose a challenge to ALL licensing systems. All of our licensing clients give you the ability to detect when running in a VM to either prevent it or (in the case of the Protection PLUS 5 SDK) make the fingerprint matching more strict. Here is a blog post on the topic:
In summary, some options include preventing your software from running in a virtual environment or implementing a Network Floating Licensing to enforce concurrent usage. For more details on your implementation options with the SoftwareKey System, view our post:
On a related note, there is a lot of power in considering the ideas captured in this blog post:
The same build of your software can look to the license to see under what environments the software is allowed to run. You can allow certain (more trustworthy) customers to run your software under VM and remote desktop environments or block it!