An organization must have a valid Enterprise Edition license or Advanced Security Edition license for the MX series in order to work properly. Each organization is licensed for a maximum number of security appliances for a certain amount of time, typically from one year to five years. For example, the organization may be licensed for 25 appliances with the Enterprise Edition through January 30, 2012.

In addition, each organization is required to use either the Enterprise Edition or the Advanced Security Edition uniformly. For example, you can have all 25 appliances using Enterprise Edition or Advanced Security Edition, but you cannot have 20 appliances using one edition and 5 using the other edition. If you wish to use Enterprise Edition for some appliances and Advanced Security Edition for other appliances, you need to create two organizations: one for your appliances with the Enterprise Edition and another for the appliances with the Advanced Security Edition.

You can manage a given organization's licenses on the Organization > License info page. The page displays the following information:

• Status: OK or problem
• Expiration date
• MX Advanced Security enabled or disabled
• Licensed device limit for each device type
• Current device count for each device type
• License history (list of licenses that have been applied to the network).