Overview

This document serves as a guide for obtaining, distributing, and managing the Ansys commercial license for WARG. It is intended for a mechanical lead or project manager who wants to make Ansys accessible for the mechanical subteam and has a Ansys Support Coordinator or License Portal Administrator role.

1.0 Obtaining a license

Although a free student edition for Ansys exists, it has 2 major limitations. For mechanical simulations the student version is limited to under 32 000 nodes, and for CFD simulations the user is restricted to 512k cells. Decent FEA and CFD simulations require more elements, especially for larger and complex geometries. The student edition can use a maximum of 4 cores to solve. For computers with more cores can run simulations faster.

A commercial Ansys license for student teams can be requested at Free Software for Student Design Teams | Ansys Partnership.

The partnership must be requested using a personal email address (uwaterloo.ca is fine) and not the general WARG email address. This person must also have an Ansys student account because the same credential will be used to manage the licensing portal. Ideally, this individual is a mechanical lead or a project manager. After a few days, they will receive an email like the one below. The person who applied for the partnership will now become an Ansys Support Coordinator (ASC), AKA an administrator.

2.0 Distributing Licenses

To log-in into the Ansys licensing portal, use the same credentials as your Ansys account. A playlist is linked below, which contains guides for the Ansys licensing portal and activating entitlements:

ANSYS Licensing Portal Overview (youtube.com)

There are 2 main ways to distribute licenses:

Create a licensing server that will store all licenses, and members can checkout a license by using a VPN to connect to the server.
Create a license file for members that will be stored locally on their computers and they are able to use the Ansys products.

Option 1 is the preferred way of distributing Ansys to the general team, while option 2 can be implemented on the WARG Bay desktop.

2.1 Option 1

To implement option 1, this document assumes that WARG already has a server that members can connect to through VPN, and that the person administering the server has an Ansys support coordinator or license portal administrator role.

Summary of key steps:

Download Capture License Server Information | Ansys in the server desktop, and generate a license server information for the desktop. Instructions: https://youtu.be/LfWxysZbpT8
In the Licensing Portal, create a license server using the information obtained from the license server information file (you can open the file as notepad.
Assign entitlements to the license server, you may assign all available licenses to the server if desired. Check the ‘borrowable’ option before generating a license file. Ansys Licensing: Activating Entitlements (youtube.com)
Save the license file in ‘Documents’ or somewhere safe.
Download Ansys License Manager in the server desktop, upload the license file to the manager and now, the Ansys licensing server should be activated. Installing ANSYS License Manager 2023 on Windows (youtube.com)
Follow the instructions in ANSYS License Manager: Configuring Firewall Exceptions on Windows (youtube.com). Note: not all .exe license files may be available, in which case, just allow whichever license files are available that are mentioned in the video through the firewall.
Unblock the ports in the image below:
Now, users who are connected to the server desktop through VPN should be able to ‘borrow’ Ansys licenses that are running in the server desktop.

2.2 Option 2

To implement option 2, refer to the tutorial below:

Downloading Ansys Student Team Licenses from the Ansys License Portal (youtube.com)