Offline Licensing on Cisco 9800 WLC — The Easy Way

Do you have a Cisco Catalyst 9800 Wireless LAN Controller (WLC) without internet access that you need to license? Are you sick of deploying additional licensing servers just to license a single device?

Offline licensing method is the easiest out of all:

• Doesn't require internet access
• Doesn't require additional licensing servers or VMs
• Fastest
• Has to be performed only once

Keep in mind, this licensing method is available only starting 17.3.2 release.

High Level Overview

The offline method works by generating a Resource Utilization Measurement (RUM ) report on the WLC. This is a basic text file that contains details about WLC and the APs joined to it (serial numbers, model numbers, etc..).

This file needs to be manually uploaded to the Cisco’s licensing portal (called CSSM — Cisco Smart Software Manager). Once uploaded, the CSSM will generate an ACK text file that needs to be uploaded back to the WLC and activated. Thats literally it!

Selecting License Level

Cisco 9800 has 2 license levels: Essential & Advantage.

Each AP joined to the 9800 WLC will consume 2 licenses:
- 1x Aironet DNA Term License
- 1x AP Perpetual Networkstack License

This means that if you set advantage level license on your WLC, every AP will consume 1x Aironet DNA Advantage Term License & 1x AP Perpetual Networkstack Advantage License.

Depending on which license level you purchased and deposited to your Smart Licensing account, you need to select the same license level that WLC should be using. In the Licensing tab of the WLC WebUI, you can see what is currently being used:

Changing license level requires reboot.

WLC can use only one type of license at the time. Either Essential or advantage. You cannot have part of the APs using essential and part of the APs using advantage.

Detailed Procedure

First of all, set WLC to in offline licensing mode:

9800-L-F# conf t
Enter configuration commands, one per line.  End with CNTL/Z.
9800-L-F(config)# license smart transport off

On the WLC, make sure that all Access Points are joined and that WLC started consuming the license.

WLC starts consuming licenses every 8 hours. This means that you might need to wait up to 8 hours to see license count change once you join new APs. There is no way to manually change this.

You can verify number of consumed licenses under Licensing tab in WLC WebUI or by running the command “show license summary”. Make sure that the count number matches the number of joined APs.

Count should be equal to number of joined APs — If not, wait up to 8 hours

9800-L-F#show license summary 
Account Information:
  Smart Account: <none>
  Virtual Account: <none>

License Usage:
  License                 Entitlement Tag               Count Status
  -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
  lic_c9800l_perf         (LIC_C9800L_PERF)                 1 IN USE
  air-network-essentials  (DNA_NWSTACK_E)                   1 IN USE
  air-dna-essentials      (AIR-DNA-E)                       1 IN USE

Once your license usage is equal to the number of joined APs, generate a RUM report. This might take up to 10–15 seconds, depending on the number of APs:

9800-L-F# license smart save usage all file bootflash:RUM_report.txt

Navigate to Administration > File Manager in the WLC WebUI and download the RUM_report.txt file:

Open your smart licensing account and Navigate to Reports > Usage Data Files. Click on Upload Usage Data

and upload the RUM_report.txt file:

You will be prompted to select Virtual account that you want to use:

It can take several minutes for the RUM report to be processed. Once finished, you will be able to download your acknowledgement file:

The download ACK file will be named ACK_RUM_report.txt. It needs to be uploaded to WLC, easiest way being through webUI File Manager:

To activate the license, run the import command. Output should produce a success message:

9800-L-F#license smart import bootflash:ACK_RUM_report.txt
Import Data Successful

That is literally it! WLC is considered licensed once the ACK file has been successfully imported. The output of “show license status” will show the time last acknowledgement was received.

9800-L-F#show license status 
.
..
Usage Reporting:
  Last ACK received: Apr 19 10:47:11 2023 UTC
  Next ACK deadline: Jul 18 10:47:11 2023 UTC

You will see the next ACK deadline time as well. However, WLC will continue working just fine ever if this time expires. It only needs a single ACK file to be uploaded only once.

On your CSSM portal, you should see the licenses being consumed. In this example, WLC was configured to use Advantage level license, meaning it will consume 1 of each advantage level license:

Freeing Up the Licenses

In a case that licenses need to be freed up or APs need to be migrated to another WLC, it is possible to free up the used licenses.

On your licensing account, navigate to Inventory > Product instances. Select the correct Virtual Account, find your WLC hostname and remove the instance:

After instance is removed, the license consumption will disappear.

On the WLC side, there is no need to do anything. If you still wish to clean up the WLC, you can perform a licensing factory reset (requires WLC reload):

9800-L-F#license smart factory reset
%Warning: reload required after "license smart factory reset" command