arivis software products are protected from unauthorized use by a licensing system provided by a third-party provider. This licensing system allows institutions who purchase licenses to protect their asset, and us as software vendors from the illegal distribution of our products. Licensing works by locking the software to a specific piece of hardware, typically a computer or dongle.

In the case of a hard key, the license is effectively located on a USB dongle, and whichever machine has the key plugged in is able to read the license and make it available to users. 

In the case of soft licenses, the key is activated on a computer by making a digital fingerprint of the machine on which it is activated and locking the activation to this fingerprint.

This is important when using a virtual machine. If you have a dongle, the dongle must be visible to the virtual machine. If you are using a soft key, changes to the virtual machine, such as copying it to a new computer, will change the VM's fingerprint and irreversibly invalidate the license. Therefore, if you activate a soft license on a VM, you MUST deactivate the license prior to making any changes to the VM and reactivate once the changes are completed. Failure to do this will invalidate the license and support related to License invalidation due to VM changes are not covered by warranty or maintenance and may be chargeable.

Please see the article Activating, updating and transferring licenses to find out more about activating and transferring licenses.