Removing ILMT as an Inventory Source

FlexNet Manager Suite 2023 R1 (On-Premises)

Important: Before proceeding, collect and archive your final reports of IBM PVU and IBM VPC sub-capacity consumption from ILMT. These may be required for submission to IBM if they cover part of the current reporting period; and they may also be required for an auditor to validate the future results from FlexNet Manager Suite against the past results from ILMT.

While you were relying on ILMT as the source of truth for sub-capacity calculations for IBM PVU and IBM VPC licenses, you probably had two inventory agents deployed to target devices:

• The ILMT agent
• The FlexNet inventory agent.

Now that you have switched to FlexNet Manager Suite for sub-capacity calculations on these licenses, the points calculated by ILMT are no longer visible in the web interface of FlexNet Manager Suite. You now have two choices about the ILMT agents:

• You may continue to use ILMT as an inventory source from which data is integrated into FlexNet Manager Suite, but keeping in mind that no consumed points calculated by ILMT are visible now that FlexNet Manager Suite is in high-frequency sub-capacity mode. (You may also be using these ILMT agents to continue populating ILMT with data.) As long as you have ILMT as an inventory source, FlexNet Manager Suite does provide a report (in Reports mode) with which you can compare the sub-capacity results calculated by the two products, at least for IBM PVU licenses.
• You may decide that you no longer want to maintain two agents, and therefore want to remove ILMT as an inventory source.

You achieve this by removing the inventory connection to the ILMT database. The details for deleting a connection depend on the location of the inventory beacon that manages that connection:

• If it is a free-standing inventory beacon, removing a connection is a two-stage process, where you remove details from the relevant inventory beacon, and also from the web interface for FlexNet Manager Suite. If you do only the latter, the connection is recreated every time inventory is imported from ILMT. If you do only the former, there is no clean-up of data on the central application server. Both actions are required.
• If the inventory beacon is co-installed on your application server (or, in large, multi-server implementations, your batch server), it has direct access to the database, and deletion on the inventory beacon has two flow-on effects:
  1. The record of the connection shown in the Inventory Data tab of the Data Inputs page in the web interface is deleted simultaneously.
  2. All inventory device records that appear only in inventory from this connection (and are not linked to asset records) are also deleted, along with their installed applications and (from the next compliance calculation) license consumption (but records of the licenses themselves are not removed). In this case, it may be best practice to defer deleting the connection until you can verify that the FlexNet inventory agent is successfully installed on all target inventory devices and has reported inventory at least once, so that none of these inventory device records disappear.

To remove an existing ILMT inventory connection:

1. On the inventory beacon that connects to ILMT, start FlexNet Beacon using the Run as administrator option, and select the Inventory systems page.
2. From the list of connections, select the ILMT connection, and below the listing, click Delete.
3. In the confirmation dialog, click OK.
   This removes the connection data from the inventory beacon, but there is no communication about this change from a free-standing inventory beacon to the central application server, where another manual edit is required, as described in the following steps.

   Tip: If this inventory beacon is co-installed on your central application server (or, in a multi-server implementation, your batch server), your process is complete. In this case, the above deletion affects both the inventory beacon and the central compliance database, and any inventory records that appeared only in the ILMT data uploads from this connection (and are not linked to asset records) are removed from the database. (If the inventory device is linked to an asset, the inventory device is not deleted, and instead its status is set to Awaiting Inventory.)
4. In the web interface for FlexNet Manager Suite, navigate to the system menu ( in the top right corner), choose Data Inputs, and select the Inventory Data tab.
5. Scroll down to find the row for the ILMT connection, and click that row to expand its details.
6. Just below the Input details, click the link to Delete connection, and in the confirmation dialog, click OK.

Details of the connection to ILMT are now removed from both the inventory beacon and the application server. Inventory data previously imported from ILMT through a free-standing inventory beacon that is not covered by any other inventory source is removed from the compliance database when you delete the connection details in the Data Inputs page of the web interface. This includes any ILMT-only inventory devices and related installation records, and (after the next compliance calculation) their contributions to license consumption. License records created to match ILMT inventory are not deleted (although, appropriately, their consumption figures may be affected).

Tip: If you had previously linked an ILMT-only inventory device record to an asset record, the inventory device is not deleted, and instead is given a Status value of Awaiting Inventory. If removal was intended, the asset record and inventory device record can both be removed manually.

You may now use your preferred company processes to remove the ILMT agent from target inventory devices.