Accurate visibility and licensing of production and non-production instances for IBM Cloud Pak licenses

IT Asset Management now provides accurate IBM PVU and VPC licensing for installations of production, and non-production Cloud Pak instances.

Prior to this release, IT Asset Management was not able to differentiate between production and non-production instances of IBM Cloud Pak licenses. As a consequence, it was not possible to correctly count the number of Cloud Pak instances installed on non-production machines (machines primarily used for testing, development and so on).

When compared to production machines, non-production machines employ different conversion ratios and licensing costs vary significantly. Since IT Asset Management was not able to differentiate between production and non-production instances, the same conversion ratio (the ratio explicitly used for production devices) was applied to both production and non-production IBM Cloud Pak instances, severely impacting cost.

To rectify this problem, the new Inventory Device Roles page gives you the ability to view inventory device roles and decide whether or not they are counted as production or non-production roles for application recognition. This new page contains a list of all available device roles in IT Asset Management (Development, Training, Production and so on), and corresponding Production check boxes. To count a device as production, simply check the Production check box. To count a device as non-production, leave the Production check box unchecked.

In addition to the new Inventory Device Roles page, the suite replacement capability accessible in the Evidence tab under Application Properties has been extended with a new Require non-production role check box. When checked, IT Asset Management will only do the suite replacement and recognise the suite instead of the member application(s), if the device with installations of the member applications is assigned to a non-production role.

To recognize non-production IBM Cloud Pak instances, all non-production application suites have been added to the Application Recognition Library (ARL). Customers will not have to create non-production suites and assign applications to the suites themselves. Each of the added suites require a non-production role. The minimum number of Cloud Pak instances installed on a non-production machine is one, and each installation will have a single child application which is the non-production equivalent of the production application. As per the aforementioned code changes, when inventory is now collected and the Require non-production role check box is checked, if the device role is defined as non-production, the suite replacement will happen and the non-production equivalent of the application is recognized.

By employing both steps described above, you can now choose what inventory devices are production and non-production, and IT Asset Management will recognize non-production software and apply the correct non-production conversion ratio.

For more information on selecting production or non-production for inventory device roles, and the new Require non-production role check box, see Inventory Device Roles and Evidence Tab: Suite and Member Evidence in the Online Help.

IT Asset Management (Cloud)

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