License & trial
The License page shows your entitlement and lets you activate a key. Asternodis is licensed per DR Site Pair, per year, and every tier includes the full feature set.
The free trial
Every install includes a 14-day full-feature trial: nothing is held back, so you can prove recovery in your own environment before you pay. The 14 days start when you create your first DR Site Pair, not at install, so setup time doesn’t count against them. The clock runs from that first pair for good: deleting every pair does not restart it. The page shows days remaining and current state.
Activating a key
Enter your license key (in the form DR-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX) to activate. Activation happens online
and then the app validates offline against a cached, signed token. If you buy a
key before your trial ends, activating updates your entitlement immediately.
Your license covers a pool of DR site-pairs you can spread across as many installs as you like: a 5-pair license can run one pair on five controllers, five pairs on one, or anything in between. Each install that activates the key takes a seat. At each check-in the licensing service totals the pairs across your live installs against your entitlement, and your My licenses page on asternodis.com shows that total.
Reusing a key after a wipe just works. If you rebuild or retire a controller, its seat frees itself once it stops checking in (about a month). To free it immediately, click Remove key here before wiping, or release the seat from your My licenses page on asternodis.com.
One license per pair, not per site
A DR Site Pair is a relationship between two sites, and the license is denominated in pairs, so one license covers both halves. Activate the key on the site that holds it, usually the primary; the other site inherits the entitlement across the authenticated pair link and needs no key of its own. The inheriting site’s License page says so under its status: it names the site the license is held on, and explains that this site holds no key and does not need one. That line only appears on a site that is actually inheriting: while a pair is still in its trial there is no license to inherit yet, so nothing is shown.
The recovery site does not hold a copy of the key, by design. A key can be bound to a specific site, and a copy would be rejected there: that binding is what stops one key being reused across unrelated installs. What crosses the link is the evaluated status, asserted by the site that actually holds the key.
Inheritance can only ever grant. It never shortens an expiry, never restricts what the receiving site may do, and never applies the expiry lockdown, for two reasons that matter more than a tidy single answer:
- A site that is licensed in its own right keeps its own terms. Inheriting can’t hand it the partner’s, even if those are worse.
- If the site holding the key becomes unreachable, the other site keeps what it was already granted. That is precisely the moment it is needed, and a licensing check is never allowed to stand between you and a recovery.
Each install still reports its own pair count (what it actually holds) while the allowance is the license’s. Remove the pair, or let the license lapse, and the inheriting site falls back to its own terms.
The pair pool
The pool is counted in pairs, not seats: a seat is one install and is not capped. The license meters DR Site Pairs and, on business tiers, protected nodes (see Node allowance).
Volume plans (5, 10, 25 pairs) give you a pool of DR site-pairs shared by every install that uses the key. The License page shows how many pairs the license covers, how many this controller holds, and how many more it can add (counted from this controller’s pairs only). The total in use across all your installs, and with it your remaining headroom, is on your My licenses page on asternodis.com. Spread those pairs across as many controllers as you like. Creating more pairs than your entitlement on a single controller is blocked there; across installs the total is reconciled centrally and only flagged for review if it goes over. A licensing count never interrupts replication or recovery. Buy more pairs any time to raise the pool.
During the trial there is no pair limit at all. The License page’s DR Site Pair licenses panel reads “Unlimited during the trial”, and you can create as many DR Site Pairs as your evaluation needs: the trial is bounded by its 14 days, not by a pair count. So you can model a real topology, not a cut-down one, before deciding what to buy.
Node allowance
Business tiers are also sized by protected nodes: the distinct Proxmox nodes hosting guests you protect. Business covers up to 4, Business Plus up to 12, and Enterprise is unlimited; the 5-, 10- and 25-pair packs include 20, 40 and 100 nodes, pooled across every install sharing the key. Home Lab has no node limit, and neither does the trial.
The License page’s Nodes protected tile shows this site’s count against the allowance (for
example 3 of 4), and a line beneath it gives the figure across every install that shares the
key. The allowance is enforced on two paths, both about adding something. This controller
cannot add another DR Site Pair, or join one as its production side, while its node count
exceeds the allowance, and protecting a guest on a node that has no protected guests yet
is refused once every node
the license covers is in use. The refusal says how to free one: protect it on a node that
already has protected guests, unprotect every guest on a node (pausing does not free it), or
move to a plan with more nodes. Nothing already running is touched. Protected guests keep
replicating (including one that live-migrates to a new node), and failover, failback, abort,
DR tests and resume are never gated by the node count, however far over the allowance a
license is. The page shows an amber notice, and the licensing service flags a pool that goes
over for review.
When the trial or license expires
Asternodis gets deliberately assertive at expiry, but never at the cost of your ability to recover. Once a trial ends, or a paid license lapses past its grace period:
- Scheduled replication pauses: recovery copies stop updating until you activate a key.
- New protected work is blocked: you can’t add a DR Site Pair, protect a new guest, run a DR test, or start a planned migration.
- Recovery still works. Failover, failback, and abort stay available, so you can always bring guests up at the recovery site and return them home in a real disaster, licensed or not.
A paid license first shows a 14-day “expiring” warning, then enters a 7-day grace period where everything keeps working normally; the lockdown applies only after grace. Activating a key lifts it immediately: replication resumes on the next cycle.
DR-safe by design
A licensing-service or internet outage never costs a paid license its protection before it runs out of what it paid for: the app validates offline against a signed, cached token, reading the license never touches the network, and a check-in that can’t get through simply tries again later. And even a genuine expiry (above) never blocks recovery: failover and failback are always available. The tokens the licensing service issues at activation and check-in are site-bound, are refreshed at each check-in, and are never valid past the license’s own expiry date; the app checks in daily, and hourly from 48 hours before the token expires. The token also records the date the license is paid through, which bounds how long a controller that can’t reach the licensing service keeps running: it carries on with a warning on the License page and nothing restricted until that window lapses, then the grace period described above applies, and then the lockdown. The License page shows Paid through and Last validated. The next successful check-in restores everything, and a license the service has revoked, or whose payment is past due, loses this allowance and says why.
Home Lab vs Business
Asternodis is offered as a discounted non-commercial Home Lab tier and a Business tier, the same software either way. See the license terms for what counts as non-commercial.
Next: Users & security.