New functionality added for IBM licensing capabilities for container environments

Note:This feature is available with IT Asset Management.

IT Asset Management now supports two new additional IBM license metric types: Resource Unit (RU) and Managed Virtual Server (MVS). With the support of these additional license metric types, IBM RU licenses and IBM MVS licenses can now be created in IT Asset Management for the following Cloud Paks:

IBM Cloud Pak for network automation
IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps
IBM Cloud Pak for security.

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. IT Asset Management normalizes the data from the IBM License Service, and recognizes the Cloud Paks and bundled products they contain, as well as any stand-alone IBM products.

As usual, you can link those products to the appropriate licenses, and when IT Asset Management 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). IBM requires that, for products (including Cloud Paks) running in Kubernetes clusters, you must use the IBM License Service to identify the products. You can now do this in IT Asset Management for IBM RU or IBM MVS license types.

The following reports in IT Asset Management have been created to provide further insights into peak and current consumption data of software covered by MVS licenses and RU licenses and the license entitlements consumed against those licenses:

IBM MVS License Consumption Report 
IBM RU License Consumption Report 
IBM MVS License Current Consumption Report 
IBM RU License Current Consumption Report 

In addition, the existing Cloud Pak reports (IBM Cloud Pak License Consumption report and IBM Cloud Pak License Current Consumption report) have been updated to report on Cloud Paks with RU and MVS metric types.

Note:Bundled products licensed with any metric (VPC, PVU, MVS, RU) will now be converted to the metric associated with the Cloud Pak. For example, for a Cloud Pak RU license, if the bundled product was licensed with a VPC metric, VPC will be converted to the RU metric. This is displayed in the Product conversion ratio column in the Consumption tab of License Properties.

To meet IBM's reporting requirements, IBM MVS and RU report data is included in the IBM audit report package, available for download in IT Asset Management. This package can be used as a trusted source for audit. To download the package, open the report in IT Asset Management, select the reporting period, and click the Download the IBM audit report link.