[northlandboy]

Local licenses are the old method of licensing modules. I think it was around NG that they introduced central licensing. In Usercenter, when generating a new license, you just say that it is a central license, and you use the IP address of your management server (or probably your CMA IP address, since I suspect you're using P-1, with that many modules). You do this for all your modules' licenses. Effectively, all your licenses are then the same.

You then import the licenses into SmartUpdate, and attach them to the modules. No mucking around with fw putlic.

For initial setup, it probably doesn't make that much difference. Where it comes into its own is when you start moving modules around. Decommissioned one firewall, deploying a new one, with a different IP? No problem, just detach license from the old one, attach it to the new firewall. Need to move some of your feature strings around - e.g. you now need encryption on a module that wasn't previously licensed for it, but you have another firewall that has the license, but doesn't need it - no problem, just swap the licenses over. No need to go back into Usercenter and re-address licenses - which have limits on the number of times you can re-address them.

There's probably some other benefits somewhere, but those are the main ones.