How to Enable Elastic Licensing for ANSYS Electronics Desktop

The ANSYS License Settings tool is proper to setup Elastic Licensing for Structural and CFD products, but not for Electronics Desktop software.  These changes must be made manually.  Let me explain.

Electronics Desktop is separate from Fluids/Structures software when it comes to Elastic Licensing.  The way that Ansys knows where to pull the license (any license, whether it’s Elastic or not) is based on the "ansyslmd.ini" file.  However, there are 2 "ansyslmd.ini" files: One for Structures/Fluids and another for Electronics Desktop.  Additionally, the tool we normally use to facilitate Elastic Licensing, the ANSYS License Settings tool, only affects Structures/Fluids products.  It does NOT work for Electronics Desktop which is a bit confusing.  Therefore, to fix this, we need to adjust the "ansyslmd.ini" file for Electronics Desktop, which is generally located under "C:\Program Files\AnsysEM\Shared Files\Licensing".

The second thing to keep in mind is how this file works.  The ".json" file is is downloaded from the Licensing Portal online and contains customer specific credentials required to access the Elastic Currency. 

Contents of the JSON:
{
"clsid":"SOMEARRAYOFLETTERSANDNUMBERS",
"Alias":"SOMEARRAYOFLETTERSANDNUMBERS",
"PIN":"123456"
}

With that ".json" file, when imported into ANSYS License Settings, the tool automatically adjusts the "ansyslmd.ini" file to input that credential information for Structures and Fluids.  Since it doesn’t work for Electronics Desktop, that will need to be manually adjusted.  The easiest way to do so is to copy the Electronics Desktop "ansyslmd.ini" file to the desktop or to another folder where it can be easily manipulated.  Once there, you can open it with any text editor.  You’ll also want to open the ".json" file (see above), which can be viewed from a text editor.  Once open, you’ll see something similar to the first line of what I’ve shown below.  That first line denotes the server (in the image below, SERVER_NAME), but is not required.  If there is no license, you can either remove that line, or you can put a “#” at the beginning of the line to suppress that line.  Once that’s done you need to enter the Elastic Credentials from the ".json" file to enable Elastic Currency. 

 

It must be entered as shown below, where the line should be ANSYS_ELASTIC_CLS, then the CSLID from the ".json" file followed by the PIN.  The CSLID is assigned by Ansys, but the PIN is set by the customer.  Try to open the Electronics Desktop software and it should open without any issue.