If you’re familiar with Kofax Capture’s software-based licensing, you know that any time you try to move your license, you’ll need to contact Kofax so you can reactivate. You need to do this because when you activate, the MAC address for your license server is stored on Kofax servers.

This all works fine when your MAC address doesn’t change—but what happens when your virtualize? What happens when you want to install Kofax Capture in the cloud?

I’ve set up development/testing environments in both Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS). I’ve found that there is no real way to keep your MAC address fixed in Azure, but there is a way to do this in AWS.

Here’s how I did it in AWS:

1. On the EC2 Dashboard, select Network Interfaces under Network & Security. Select the Create Network Interface.
2. Set up the Network Interface. You should probably choose a subnet that you’ll use for your other Kofax Capture VMs (e.g., workstations). Select a Security Group that has the permissions you want. We’ll publish a post later on how we’ve set up our Security Groups.
3. Create a new EC2 instance, but don’t select all of the defaults. This is where you will link your new instance to the Network Interface you just created.
4. When you get to Step 3: Configure Instance Details, select the subnet you created your Network Interface in and under Network interfaces, select your new Network Interface for device eth0. This will bind your primary network interface and MAC address to a static resource.
5. Go ahead and set up your instance as you like.

Now when you go to install Kofax Capture and activate your license, you will see that shutting down your instance will not cause your license to break!