Licensing in case of "federated" servers

Mikhail T February 27, 2015

We've imported a large number of "legacy" projects from various pre-JIRA issue trackers. These have to be kept online for occasional references, but are never modified (read-only).

We'd like to move them to a separate JIRA-instance, federated with the active one so as to keep the main instance with active projects more nimble. However, we have only one 2000-user license.

Can we split the instance like this – the user-accounts are all maintained in the same company-wide Active Directory anyway – or would it require doubling the license costs even though the number of users is the same?

Please, advise. Thank you!

3 answers

1 accepted

0 votes
Answer accepted
George Lewe (LSY)
Rising Star
Rising Star
Rising Stars are recognized for providing high-quality answers to other users. Rising Stars receive a certificate of achievement and are on the path to becoming Community Leaders.
March 1, 2015

We had the same situation and discussed it with Atlassian. I can confirm that a license split is not possible. You need another license for the other instance. Unfortunately, after we bought that license, Atlassian recommended against Federation in favor of going with Data Center. Data Center has a different pricing model that you should check first. It is much more expensive.

MikeyS
Rising Star
Rising Star
Rising Stars are recognized for providing high-quality answers to other users. Rising Stars receive a certificate of achievement and are on the path to becoming Community Leaders.
March 2, 2015

Data Center will only really help you if you're having issues with concurrent users. As far as licensing goes, you're still looking at one license per JIRA instance (just spread out over multiple machines). So for the case of multiple JIRA instances, Data Center wouldn't help.

Mikhail T March 6, 2015

Well, for the time being, we still haven't outgrown Amazon's collection of "instances". If Atlassian's attitude is as described, we'll just keep the server on one system and keep getting beefier instance-types as our needs grow...

0 votes
MikeyS
Rising Star
Rising Star
Rising Stars are recognized for providing high-quality answers to other users. Rising Stars receive a certificate of achievement and are on the path to becoming Community Leaders.
February 27, 2015

Daniel is correct.  Each instance of JIRA requires its own set of licenses.  You do have a cost saving option in your use case depending on the sensitivity of your data and how much control you have over access to your JIRA server.  The option that I'm referring to is to set up anonymous access to your "legacy" instance.  This means you can go with the most basic user license (10 users) and still give people access to browse the system.  Of course, anonymous access means that anyone who can reach your JIRA server can view the issues, so you would need to tightly control access to the server if the data was sensitive.  For very sensitive data, I would avoid this option altogether.

0 votes
Daniel Wester
Rising Star
Rising Star
Rising Stars are recognized for providing high-quality answers to other users. Rising Stars receive a certificate of achievement and are on the path to becoming Community Leaders.
February 27, 2015

Each instance would need its own set of licenses (including the plugins). You might explore Data Center since then you might not need to split them.

Suggest an answer

Log in or Sign up to answer