Inventory Device Properties / Cloud Hosting Tab

IT Asset Management displays the Cloud hosting tab on the inventory device properties page when you select any cloud service provider (anything except On-premises) in the Hosted in property on the General tab.

Note:This tab is automatically removed, and its values lost (with no undo), if you confirm a switch of the Hosted in property on the General tab from the name of your cloud service provider back to the default On- premises value. These values are relevant only to a cloud service provider.

This tab is not available for multi-edit of more than one cloud instance at a time.

Properties in this tab are populated automatically for those cloud service providers where IT Asset Management supports a direct connection (such as AWS). For these cases, imported data always overrides any manual edits. For other cloud service providers, you may record values manually where this assists your record-keeping.

The majority of these properties are similar to those available for virtual machines, and the VM Properties tab may also be displayed where the instance hosted by your cloud service provider is a virtual machine. However, other, non-VM cloud instances are also reported on this Cloud hosting tab, such as bare metal instances and dedicated hosts. The fields available are reduced when the reported instance is a VM Host, correctly displaying the reduced data reported by the cloud service provider.

Important:On the General tab, consider checking that the Name for this device (and possibly also its reported Domain name) are likely to be unique, and specifically that these are not the default values provided in the base image from which this device was instantiated. The device name and domain name are the keys to uniquely identify a device. If you have multiple instances reporting the same values, these records are all merged into one, which is unlikely to be correct for your licensing requirements. If you have not already done so, you can configure preferences for Inventory Agent that specify the names to report. For more information, see Common: Ensuring Distinct Inventory in Gathering FlexNet Inventory.

The following inventory device properties (listed alphabetically) are available on this tab.

Cloud Hosting Tab Details

Property

Description

Account

The identifier or name that your cloud service provider gives to your enterprise to distinguish resources to which you subscribe from those available to other enterprises.

(Not available from Google Cloud instances.)

For manual editing, follow the guidelines from your cloud service provider to obtain the account identifier for your enterprise, and copy it into this field.

Availability type

The type of hosting provided for this instance. (Various property names are used by cloud service providers, such as "Tenancy" by AWS.)

(Not available from Google Cloud instances.)

For manual editing, select one of the following values:

•

Default—Your virtual machine (instance) is made available on shared hardware (which may also host resources for other customers of the cloud service provider).

•

Dedicated instance—This is a "dedicated instance", or a virtual machine made available on hardware that is dedicated to your enterprise alone, but still managed by the cloud service provider. This may be helpful for software licenses that rely on stable values for certain hardware properties.

•

On dedicated host—Your virtual machine is made available on a "dedicated host", which is an isolated server for your enterprise alone, with configurations that you can control.

For those cloud service providers where IT Asset Management supports a direct data-gathering connection, such as AWS, the value is imported and displayed automatically.

Availability zone

An availability zone (as defined by AWS) is an isolated location within a region, with each region including multiple availability zones. Each virtual machine (or instance, including a VM Host) is associated with a single availability zone, reported here.

For manual editing, copy in the availability zone reported by your cloud service provider. This value is overwritten by imports where IT Asset Management supports a direct data-gathering connection with the cloud service provider, such as with AWS.

Cores

For a virtual machine instance reported by the cloud service provider, this is the number of cores assigned to the instance.

(Not available from Google Cloud instances.)

The number of Cores as gathered in inventory displays in the Hardware tab of these inventory device properties. That tab also allows you to override the inventory value where necessary to correct inventory shortcomings or errors. In this Cloud hosting tab, the Cores value is as reported by your cloud service provider through an API (where supported). Because your cloud service provider is the source of truth for a device hosted in the cloud, any override in the Hardware tab has no effect on the value reported here. Furthermore, if you edit the value here, the core count will be restored at the next import from the cloud service provider (for cloud service providers with a direct data connection available, such as AWS).

Creation date

The date and time reported by the cloud service provider when charging for the cloud service began, on which either:

•

For a virtual machine, it was instantiated

•

For another device type, rental of the device commenced.

(Not available from Google Cloud instances.)

For manual editing, copy the date/time provided by your cloud service provider. The value is updated directly for cloud service providers where IT Asset Management supports a direct data-gathering connection, such as AWS.

Host ID

The ID that the cloud service provider returned for the host of a virtual machine instance, which is then used to link the VM to its host. If this record is for a VM Host, the Host ID is used to link hosted virtual machines to this inventory device record.

Tip:Typically, inventory is gathered from cloud instances that are virtual machines, but inventory is not normally gathered for cloud-based VM hosts. Therefore the automated behavior depends on the device type:

•

For virtual machines, inventory device records are created only for those devices that are actually reported in inventory.

•

For VM hosts where no inventory is expected, an inventory device is automatically created from a reference found in the data collected directly from the cloud service provider (for those supporting a direct import, such as AWS). This allows for correct linking and display of the host/machine hierarchy. Typically this information is only available for a dedicated host.

For manual editing, use the guidelines provided by your cloud service provider to identify the host of this virtual machine (or instance). (For cloud service providers where IT Asset Management supports a direct connection for data import, this value is populated automatically.)

(Not available from Google Cloud instances.)

For a virtual machine, this property (as received in incoming inventory) is also displayed on the General tab of the inventory device properties. The value in this Cloud hosting tab is reported by direct connection to your cloud service provider (for those where a direct connection is available, such as AWS). These two values should be the same, and any difference should be investigated. Compare also with the Host name displayed on the VM properties tab.

Image ID

The identifier for the machine image from which this virtual machine was instantiated. Different cloud service providers may use specialized terms, such as the AMI ID for the Amazon Machine Image ID.

For manual editing, use the guidelines provided by your cloud service provider to identify the machine image used to launch this virtual machine (or instance). (For cloud service providers where IT Asset Management supports a direct connection for data import, this value is populated automatically.)

Instance ID

The unique identification code supplied by your cloud service provider to represent this virtual machine (or "instance").

If you are manually creating an inventory device record, you may enter the instance ID reported by your cloud service provider. Be sure to enter it exactly, as this value is used to match against incoming inventory. Because the Instance ID value must be unique within the scope of each cloud service provider, you are prompted to correct any duplicated value.

Note: If you wish to save any values from your cloud service provider for this inventory device, you must provide the unique Instance ID.

Instance region

The region is a geographic area designed by your cloud service provider as functionally isolated from other regions of their infrastructure, to maximize stability and fault tolerance. For AWS, for example, the Instance ID of each virtual machine is tied to its region, even though the instance itself is actually tied to the Availability Zone (a subset of the region) where the instance was launched.

Tip:Do not confuse these regions within your cloud service provider's infrastructure with either:

•

Regions declared by IBM for IBM PVU licensing

•

The type of enterprise group within IT Asset Management called a location.

(Not available from Google Cloud instances.)

For manual editing, copy the region reported by your cloud service provider for this virtual machine (or instance). For cloud service providers where IT Asset Management supports a direct data-gathering connection, such as AWS, the Instance region is collected and displayed automatically.

Instance type

The kind of virtual machine reported by the cloud service provider for this instance. The possible values for Instance type depend on the cloud service provider shown in the Hosted in property in the General tab. Typically this choice directly controls the pricing for the virtual machine (or other instance type, where supported).

For manual editing, copy in the instance type reported by your cloud service provider. This value is overwritten by imports where IT Asset Management supports a direct data-gathering connection with the cloud service provider, such as with AWS.

Last known state

The status of the virtual machine most recently reported by your cloud service provider. It may be one of:

•

Started—The virtual machine was running at the last import.

•

Stopped—The virtual machine has been stopped, releasing all its resources to the host. Some cloud service providers allow for a virtual machine to be restarted from this state.

•

Suspended—The virtual machine has been put to sleep mode. All the running processes still consume resources, and the machine can quickly resume.

•

Terminated—(Value available from AWS) The virtual machine has been permanently deleted and cannot be restarted. At the next full import and compliance calculation, which by default happens overnight, any matching inventory device record will be removed (unless you have taken the most unusual step of linking that inventory device record to an asset record). Removing the inventory device record prevents the terminated virtual machine having any future impact on license consumption calculations. See also tip below.

•

Unknown—The state is unknown.

Tip: Some inventory sources take time to clean up inventory records, so that inventory imports may unavoidably include stale inventory in that period between the instance termination and the inventory clean-up. To help resolve any confusion, terminated instances remain available in the Cloud Service Provider Inventory page so that you can check there, confirming that the instance's inventory device record is correctly suppressed because the instance was terminated.

When this cloud-hosted instance is a virtual machine, this property is also visible in the VM properties tab (although the Terminated state is not available in that tab).

MAC address

The Media Access Control (MAC) address of the hosted instance. If the instance is hardware with multiple network interface cards, this field displays a comma-separated list of MAC addresses.

Tip:Where an Instance ID is not available in the incoming data (because, for example, data came from third-party inventory, or from an incomplete spreadsheet upload, or from an outdated version of Inventory Agent), the MAC address may be used instead to link this record with the inventory device record that shows inventory imported from the instance.

(Not available from Google Cloud instances.)

This property, reported by your cloud service provider, also displays on the General tab of the inventory device properties.

Network ID

The identification for the primary network interface associated with this virtual machine (or instance), as provided by the cloud service provider.

Tip:Some cloud service providers allow you to associate multiple network interfaces to an instance, and even to move a network interface from one instance to another (for example, AWS refers to these as "elastic network interfaces" or ENI). However, this property records only the default network interface for the instance, sometimes called the primary network interface. This cannot be detached from an instance.

(Not available from Google Cloud instances.)

When manually editing a record, you can copy the identification given by the cloud service provider for the primary network interface associated with this virtual machine (instance).

Purchased option

Some cloud service providers provide multiple ways to purchase a cloud instance. For example, AWS allows a virtual machine to be on-demand, reserved, scheduled, dedicated, or spot (run only on instances otherwise unused).

(Not available from Google Cloud instances.)

Enter your preferred name for the kind of instance you have purchased. This field is for your information, and does not affect any licensing calculations for the instance. For cloud service providers where IT Asset Management supports a direct data-gathering connection, such as AWS, this value is overwritten by data imports.

Threads per core

The number of threads that your cloud service provider reports are available for each core assigned to this virtual machine (or, when this inventory device is a server, for each of the cores available in the server). This property is available in reporting of your cloud service provider instances.

Tip:This value may be different than the Threads property reported in the Hardware tab for this inventory device. In the Hardware tab, the value is a total number of threads (either within an entire physical device, or assigned to a virtual machine); whereas this value is the count of threads for each available core. Therefore, if a virtual device is assigned 2 cores each having 2 threads available, this value shows 2 threads/core, where the Hardware tab shows 2 x 2 = 4 total threads. The count of total threads available to a virtual machine is sometimes called the number of vCPUs available to the virtual machine.

(Not available from Google Cloud instances.)

Core and thread values for IBM licensing calculations in cloud environments

For IBM licensing calculations in cloud environments, if the device's Hosted In property is anything other than "On-premise", the Threads count is used as the metric for sub-capacity license calculations; if the Threads property is empty, the Cores count is used; if the Cores property is empty, the Processors count is used.