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89 lines
5.1 KiB
Plaintext
89 lines
5.1 KiB
Plaintext
---
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layout: docs
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page_title: Consul Enterprise
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description: >-
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Consul Enterprise features a number of capabilities beyond the open source
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offering that may be beneficial in certain workflows.
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---
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# Consul Enterprise
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[Consul Enterprise](https://www.hashicorp.com/consul) features address the organizational complexities of collaboration, operations, scale and governance. It includes capabilities that improve failure resilience, read scalability, and managing access in accordance with organizational policies. It also adds support for application and service architectures across complex network topologies. If you have already purchased Consul Enterprise, please see the [licensing section](#licensing) below.
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Features include:
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- [Audit Logging](/docs/enterprise/audit-logging)
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- [Automated Backups](/docs/enterprise/backups)
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- [Automated Upgrades](/docs/enterprise/upgrades)
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- [Enhanced Read Scalability](/docs/enterprise/read-scale)
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- [Redundancy Zones](/docs/enterprise/redundancy)
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- [Advanced Federation for Complex Network Topologies](/docs/enterprise/federation)
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- [Network Segments](/docs/enterprise/network-segments)
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- [Namespaces](/docs/enterprise/namespaces)
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- [Sentinel](/docs/enterprise/sentinel)
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- [OIDC Auth Method](/docs/acl/auth-methods/oidc)
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These features are part of [Consul
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Enterprise](https://www.hashicorp.com/consul).
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## Licensing
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All Consul Enterprise agents must be licensed when they are started. Where that license comes from will depend
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on which binary is in use, whether the agent is a server, client or snapshot agent and whether ACLs have been
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enabled for the cluster.
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-> ** Consul Enterprise v1.10.0 removed temporary licensing.** In previous versions Consul Enterprise
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agents could start without a license and then have a license applied to them later on via the CLI
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or API. That functionality has been removed and replaced with the ability to load licenses from the
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agent's configuration or environment. Also prior to v1.10.0 server agents would automatically propagate
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the license between themselves. This no longer occurs and the license must be present on each server
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when they are started.
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### Binaries with Built In Licenses
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If you are downloading Consul from Amazon S3, then the license is included
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in the binary and you do not need to take further action. This is the
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most common use case.
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In the S3 bucket you will find three Enterprise zip packages. The packages with `+pro` and
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`+prem` in the name, are the binaries that include the license. The package
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with `+ent` in the name does not include the license.
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When using these binaries no further action is necessary to configure the license.
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### Binaries Without Built In Licenses
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For binaries that do not include built in licenses a license must be available at the time the agent starts.
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For server agents this means that they must either have the [`license_path`](/docs/agent/opts#license_path)
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configuration set or have a license configured in the servers environment with the `CONSUL_LICENSE` or
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`CONSUL_LICENSE_PATH` environment variables. Both the configuration item and the `CONSUL_LICENSE_PATH`
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environment variable point to a file containing the license whereas the `CONSUL_LICENSE` environment
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variable should contain the license as the value. If multiple of these are set the order of precedence is:
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1. `CONSUL_LICENSE` environment variable
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2. `CONSUL_LICENSE_PATH` environment variable
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3. `license_path` configuration item.
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Both client agents and the snapshot agent may also be licensed in the very same manner. However to prevent
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the need to configure the license on many client agents and snapshot agents those agents have the capability
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to retrieve the license automatically under specific circumstances.
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#### Client Agent License Retrieval
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When a client agent starts without a license in its configuration or environment, it will try to retrieve the
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license from the servers via RPCs. That RPC always requires a valid non-anonymous ACL token to authorize the
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request but the token doesn't need any particular permissions. As the license is required before the client
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actually joins the cluster, where to make those RPC requests to is inferred from the [`start_join`](/docs/agent/opts#start_join)
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or [`retry_join`](/docs/agent/opts#retry_join) configurations. If those are both unset or no
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[`agent` token](/docs/agent/opts#acl_tokens_agent) is set then the client agent will immediately shut itself down.
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If all preliminary checks pass the client agent will attempt to reach out to any server on its RPC port to
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request the license. These requests will be retried for up to 5 minutes and if it is unable to retrieve a
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license within that time frame it will shut itself down.
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#### Snapshot Agent License Retrieval
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The snapshot agent has similar functionality to the client agent for automatically retrieving the license. However,
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instead of requiring a server agent to talk to, the snapshot agent can request the license from the server or
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client agent it would use for all other operations. It still requires an ACL token to authorize the request. Also
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like client agents, the snapshot agent will shut itself down after being unable to retrieve the license for 5
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minutes. |