Support and licensing
Clustron Zaris is free to evaluate and starts with an automatic trial — no key, no sign-up. Running it in production is licensed. This article explains what's free, what needs a license, and how the trial lifecycle behaves. For the full lifecycle, activation methods, and troubleshooting, see the Licensing and activation guide.
What's free
- Downloading Zaris and building with it — the client SDK, in-process mode, and every API.
- A 30-day trial on every machine, automatic on first run, offline, and bound to that machine — the full product, with nothing held back during the trial.
- A Trial-tier extension key that lengthens the trial (typically to about 90 days total) when you need more evaluation time.
What needs a license
- Production use. Running Zaris in production requires an Enterprise license. Licensing is per machine — one machine is one seat, and any number of nodes on that machine share it.
- Continued operation past the trial. When the trial ends, the product enters a grace period and finally stops serving until a license is activated (see below). Nothing is ever deleted, and activating a license resumes service immediately.
How the trial ends
Licensing is tracked per machine, and each manager machine has its own trial clock. The lifecycle runs in stages:
| Stage | Web Console | Product (data plane) |
|---|---|---|
| Trial (30 days, extendable) | Works | Works |
| Trial expired (30-day grace) | Locked to the license screen | Still serving |
| Stopped (after grace) | Locked | Refuses data operations — data preserved |
| Licensed | Works | Works |
The console locks before the product stops, so you get a grace period to license without an outage. A stopped product is fully reversible: nodes stay up, nothing is deleted, and activating an Enterprise license resumes serving immediately — no restart, no data loss. Reinstalling, or presenting a second trial key, does not reset a machine's trial.
Configure it
These settings are read from the environment on each manager host; changing one requires restarting the Management Service.
| Setting | Default | Effect |
|---|---|---|
ZARIS_SUPPORT_WINDOW_DAYS | 30 | Length of the automatic trial, in days. |
ZARIS_PRODUCT_GRACE_DAYS | 30 | Grace period after the trial ends, before the product stops serving. |
ZARIS_SUPPORT_KEY | — | A license or extension key to activate automatically at startup. |
Keys are cryptographically signed and verified offline against a built-in public key — they need no internet connection and cannot be guessed, edited, or forged. Enterprise activation reaches the licensing service once to obtain a lease, then is trusted offline within its grace window.
Activate a license
Any of three ways — all take effect immediately and apply across the workspace:
- PowerShell:
Set-ZrLicense -Key 'LIC-…'(fans out to every manager in the workspace;-Deactivatereleases a seat). - Web Console: paste the key into the license screen and choose Activate.
- Environment: set
ZARIS_SUPPORT_KEYon each manager host and restart the Management Service.
Check where you stand with Get-ZrLicenseStatus, which reports a row per manager. Full details, including air-gapped activation, are in the Licensing and activation guide.
Get a license or support
To buy an Enterprise license — or to talk through which plan fits — see Support plans or email sales@clustron.io. If you already have a plan and need help, reach the team at support@clustron.io.