Support & Licensing
Both Tart Virtualization and Orchard Orchestration are licensed under Fair Source License. Usage on personal computers including personal workstations is royalty-free, but organizations that exceed a certain number of server installations (100 CPU cores for Tart and/or 4 hosts for Orchard) will be required to obtain a paid license.
Host CPU Core usage
The virtual CPU cores of Tart VMs are not tied to specific physical cores of the host CPU. Instead, for optimal performance Tart VMs will automatically try to balance compute between all available cores of the host CPU. As a result, all performance and energy-efficient cores of the host CPU are always counted towards the license usage.
License Tiers¶
By default, when no license is purchased, it is assumed that an organization is using a Free Tier license. You can find the Free Tier license text in Tart and Orchard repositories.
Free Tier license has a 100 CPU core limit for Tart and 4 Orchard Workers limit for Orchard.
Usage Scenarios Examples
Here are a few examples that fit into the free tier:
- Using Tart on 12 Mac Minis with 8 CPUs each running up to 24 VMs in parallel.
- Creating an Orchard cluster of 4 Mac Studio workers with 24 CPUs each.
Here are a few examples that do not fit into the free tier:
- Using Tart on 13 Mac Minis with 8 CPUs each.
- Creating an Orchard cluster of 5 Mac Minis workers with 8 CPUs each.
Gold Tier¶
If an organization wishes to exceed the limits of the Free Tier license, a purchase of the Gold Tier License is required, which costs $1000 per month.
Gold Tier license has a 500 CPU core limit for Tart and 20 Orchard Workers limit for Orchard.
Platinum Tier¶
If an organization wishes to exceed the limits of the Gold Tier license, a purchase of the Platinum Tier License is required, which costs $3000 per month.
Platinum Tier license has a 3,000 CPU core limit for Tart and 200 Orchard Workers limit for Orchard.
Diamond Tier¶
For organizations that wish to exceed the limits of the Platinum Tier license, a purchase of a custom Diamond Tier License is required, which costs $1 per CPU core per month and gives the ability to run unlimited Orchard Workers.
Get the license¶
If your organization is interested in purchasing one of the license tiers, please email licensing@cirruslabs.org.
You can see a template of a license subscription agreement here.
Running on AWS?
There are official AMIs for EC2 Mac Instances with preconfigured Tart installation that is optimized to work within AWS infrastructure.
Additionally, there is a ECR Pulic Gallery mirror of all the Tart VM images managed by us.
General Support¶
The best way to ask general questions about particular use cases is to email our support team at support@cirruslabs.org. Our support team is trying our best to respond ASAP, but there is no guarantee on a response time unless your organization has a paid license subscription which includes Priority Support.
If you have a feature request or noticed lack of some documentation please feel free to create a GitHub issue. Our support team will answer it by replying to the issue or by updating the documentation.
Priority Support¶
In addition to the general support we provide a Priority Support with guaranteed response times included in all the paid license tiers.
| Severity | Support Impact | First Response Time SLA | Hours | How to Submit |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Emergency (service is unavailable or completely unusable). | 30 minutes | 24x7 | Please use urgent email address. |
| 2 | Highly Degraded (Important features unavailable or extremely slow; No acceptable workaround). | 4 hours | 24x5 | Please use priority email address. |
| 3 | Medium Impact. | 8 hours | 24x5 | Please use priority email address. |
| 4 | Low Impact. | 24 hours | 24x5 | Please use regular support email address. Make sure to send the email from your corporate email. |
24x5 means period of time from 9AM on Monday till 5PM on Friday in EST timezone.
Support Impact Definitions
- Severity 1 - Your installation of Orchard is unavailable or completely unusable. An urgent issue can be filed and our On-Call Support Engineer will respond within 30 minutes. Example: Orchard Controller is showing 502 errors for all users.
- Severity 2 - Orchard installation is Highly Degraded. Significant Business Impact. Important features are unavailable or extremely slowed, with no acceptable workaround.
- Severity 3 - Something is preventing normal service operation. Some Business Impact. Important features of Tart or Orchard are unavailable or somewhat slowed, but a workaround is available.
- Severity 4 - Questions or Clarifications around features or documentation. Minimal or no Business Impact. Information, an enhancement, or documentation clarification is requested, but there is no impact on the operation of Tart and/or Orchard.
How to submit a priority or an urgent issue
Once your organization obtains a license, members of your organization will get access to separate support emails specified in your subscription contract.