IBM license consumption in containers now available

FlexNet Manager Suite version 2021 R1.3

IBM requires that, for products (including Cloud Paks) running in Kubernetes clusters, you must use the IBM License Service to identify the products and calculate the points consumed for either of the IBM VPC or IBM PVU license types. This release of FlexNet Manager Suite provides a unified license position for all VPC/PVU licensed products, whether they are installed in Kubernetes containers, or in non-containerized environments.

For each day that IBM products or Cloud Paks run in each Kubernetes cluster in your environment, either the Flexera Kubernetes inventory agent or the lightweight Kubernetes agent collects consumption information as evidence from the IBM License Service. Similarly, the standard FlexNet inventory agent might return inventory evidence from non-containerized hosts. FlexNet Manager Suite normalizes the data from all these sources, and recognizes the Cloud Paks and the bundled products they contain, as well as any stand-alone IBM products. As usual, you can link those product records to appropriate licenses, and when FlexNet Manager Suite links these to the uploaded evidence, it provides both current consumption and peak license consumption (the peak consumption over the period is the measure of interest to IBM for licensing). When the products are running in traditional infrastructure, IBM still requires that consumption is assigned to one of its three mandatory IBM regions around the world; but consumption for containers is global (not regionalized). To meet these distinct requirements, the license's Compliance tab still includes peaks for the three regions (as well as a safety net for devices that have not yet been assigned to the regions as required), plus new separate global peak (and current) consumption figure(s) for products running in containers. All these diverse sources are appropriately merged to provide a unified view of your total exposure on these licenses.

For optimum presentation, and to allow linking additional Cloud Paks to the license, the properties page for the IBM VPC license type now has an additional tab called Cloud Paks. Here you can see which Cloud Paks are consuming against the current license, and contributing to the unified license position.

The following reports in FlexNet Manager Suite have been updated to give further insights into peak and current consumption contributed by IBM product or Cloud Paks, whether these products are running in traditional or containerized environments:

• IBM PVU License Consumption
• IBM PVU License Current Consumption
• IBM Cloud Pak License Consumption
• IBM Cloud Pak License Current Consumption.

As well as being available through the reports index, these licenses are directly linked to the Consumption tab of the appropriate licenses.

Tip: The previous IBM License Service Consumption report is now renamed as the IBM Container Licensing report.