Patent ID: 8646098

Claim:
A system for managing software licensing, the system comprising: a processor of a physical machine, wherein the processor executes instructions stored in memory and wherein execution of: a binding agent running on a virtual platform extracts physical binding information of the physical machine, and a license enforcement module associated with a license and instantiated on a virtual machine hosted on the virtual platform, wherein a license file associated with the license specifies that the physical machine is allowed to run only a specified number of license enforcement modules, the license enforcement module executed to: maintain heart-beat contact with the binding agent, communicates with the binding agent to determine whether the extracted physical binding information of the physical machine corresponds to the license file and whether there is another machine with the same physical binding information associated with the binding agent, and enforces a mutex lock to ensure that no more than the specified number of license enforcement modules are running on the physical machine specified by the license file.