Configuring Regions for IBM
FlexNet Manager Suite
2020 R2
(On-Premises)
To prevent 'follow-the-sun' licensing, IBM requires that you separately license
target devices in each of three regions that it defines:
- Region 1: North America and South America
- Region 2: Europe and Africa
- Region 3: Asia and Australia.
For any given IBM PVU or IBM VPC sub-capacity license, FlexNet Manager Suite
automatically tracks consumption within the three regions, provided that:
- All the inventory devices that are consuming from the license have been assigned to a location (a type of enterprise group), and
- The locations used for this purpose have been mapped to the IBM regions.
Tip: By default, the location assigned to a host server is inherited by
all the guest VMs running on that host (as is suitable, for example, for a
departmental server and VMs). In this case, the Location
field for the guest VM is a read-only display of the inherited value. If,
instead, you want to assign VMs to locations different from their hosts (as is
typical for a host in the IT server room hosting VMs for several different
locations), navigate to the system menu ( in the top right corner),
choose System Settings, and in the
Inventory tab, clear the check box for
Update virtual machine location to match host
location; and finally scroll down to click
Save. You may then open the inventory device settings
for any guest virtual machine, edit the Location value on
its Ownership tab, and save the change.
Of course, the use of locations is not limited to representing the three mandatory
IBM regions. You may want to set up an entire structure of locations, where a
region contains countries that contain states that contain
cities that contain offices that are part of your enterprise. At
the other extreme, if you are not using locations for any other purpose, you can
minimally create just three locations, one for each of the IBM regions. The level of
sophistication you implement is entirely up to you: in all structures, FlexNet Manager Suite rolls up the consumption data to provide correct regional total
for your reporting to IBM.
Note: You cannot separately control the change-over
from ILMT to FlexNet Manager Suite one region at a time. While you need to
report by regions, your entire enterprise gets its points consumed results from
one source or the other, and makes the change-over at the same time.
This summary assumes that you do not already have appropriate locations specified.
To create a region-based enterprise structure:
- On a suitable inventory listing (such as the All Inventory page), search and filter to an appropriate set of devices.
- Make sure that all the displayed devices are of the same type. For example, filter the Inventory device type column to a single value (say, VM Host).
- On the left, select the devices that belong in the same location (but do not mix rows where the Connection name is blank with others where it is non-blank).
- Click Open to display a property sheet of properties common to the selected devices.
- Select the Ownership tab, and enter (or search for) the common location for these devices.
- Click Save, and repeat as required for other groups of inventory devices.
FlexNet Manager Suite (On-Premises)
2020 R2