KB43695 - Unmanaged vTM cluster licensed to the SSC- Service Director drops to 1 MB bandwidth without warning; FLA unable to contact any license server

Traffic Manager members licensed to the  SSC- Service Controller 2.0 (now Service Director) dropped down to 1 MB bandwidth resulting in an immediate impact to Production Traffic.  There were no warnings or errors in the Service Controller UI.  The only log entry is in the vTM errorlogs:

WARN rules/123456 rulelogmsgwarn licensekeys/123456 FLA unable to contact any license server, check addresses and server certificate 'mydomain.company.com'

After verifying that each Traffic Manager can ping and resolve both the IP address and Hostname of the SSC licensing server and vice-versa, the next step is to check the SSL certificate on the Service Director.  The SSL certificate shows expired - 45 days prior to the bandwidth drop.

Is this expected behavior?

This is expected behavior.  Once the Services Director (SD) SSL certificate expires, there is a 45 day grace period initiated  for each of the Traffic Managers licensed to the controller.  After 45 days, the vTM instance grace period expires and the Traffic Manager will drop into  Developer Mode - 1 MB bandwidth.

The solution is to generate a new self-signed SSL certificate (recommended expiration = 3650 days) and upload to the Service Director.  In addition, a new FLA must be generated in order to relicense any Traffic Manger instances to the Services Director.  Please contact Pulse Support for assistance with generating a new FLA license.

Using a supported version of Service Director of 2.6 or higher, which supports using the Universal FLA, would negate the need to regenerate a legacy FLA as long as the Traffic Managers licensed are running version 10.1 or higher.

There is an open RFE that would implement a 90/30/15 day prior warning on the vTM instance that the SSL Server Certificate of the licensing Service Controller will be expiring.