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# Understanding the Reservation File

The reservation file tells how many license tokens are reserved for members of different groups. For example, the Sales department could be a group with ten members for which 15 license tokens are reserved. The members might be network users or specific computers on the network. The reservation file might also tell that certain members of the group are excluded from taking license tokens.

When the License Manager receives a request, it checks whether the user making the request belongs to a group. If so, and license tokens are available for that group, the License Manager will issue the token(s) and decrement the token count on the License Manager. Otherwise, requests will be serviced with tokens that have not been reserved and that are available. Users for whom tokens have been reserved have first call on available tokens.

At start up, the License Manager consults the environment variable, LSRESERV, for the path and file name of the reservation file. If the variable is not set, the local directory is searched for the file, lsreserv. If no file is found, the License Manager assumes that no reservations exist.

### Reservation File Characteristics

The following apply to groups:

- A maximum of 256 groups, each with 1000 members—user names, host IDs, IP addresses (IPv4 and IP v6)—are supported.
- Groups must be mutually exclusive. Different groups for the same feature should not have common users or computers.
- Group names and member names cannot exceed 64 characters each.
- The number of license tokens reserved for a feature cannot exceed the number of concurrent copies specified in the license code for that feature.
- If you want to exclude all members of a group from using license tokens for a feature, you can specify 0 tokens.
- If the number of license tokens reserved is greater than the number of concurrent copies specified for the feature in the license code, the number of tokens specified in the license code will be used.
- Incorrect DNS settings affect the group reservation behavior. The group reservation file can contain IP addresses. If an IP address is meant to be included, then the licenses should be first obtained from the reserved pool (followed by the free pool). And, if the IP address is meant to be excluded, then no license should be granted (from free or reserved pool). However, if the above behavior is found violated, the system administrator must check the DNS settings to verify that correct hostname-IP address mappings of the client and License Manager systems.
- The capacity desired by a group for a specific feature cannot exceed the capacity of the defined for that specific feature.
- A non-capacity feature will not have any capacity related information in the reservation file.