Hardware Tab

IT Asset Management (Cloud)

The Hardware tab helps you to identify (and sometimes modify) the hardware properties of existing inventory devices, or define them for a new inventory device record being created. The appearance and behavior are slightly different in the two cases:

• Fields that are not marked with an asterisk (*) allow you to enter (or spin up) their individual values when you are manually creating an inventory device record. If a future inventory record matching this device is imported, these values are updated by the incoming inventory details.
• Properties marked with an asterisk (*) allow you to modify the values even after they have been reported from an inventory source:
  1. Click Override.
  2. In the embedded field that appears, enter or spin up the corrected value. (The original value remains visible to the left of the overridden value.)
  3. Click Save to store your override.
     Tip: To remove an override, click the x to the right of this embedded field (and remember to save the changed properties).
  Overridden values are never updated by future inventory gathering. The Overridden column available on various inventory views shows Yes for inventory device records with overridden values.
  Tip: If the incoming inventory data does not provide any value for a setting (that is, technically the value is a null), then using these same controls to fill in the missing value is regarded as setting the value, not overriding it. An initial setting does not show up in, for example, the Overridden column in listings, nor in the IBM PVU Overrides report.

Important: Overridden values for properties that affect license consumption only take effect from the next full license reconciliation. In the special case of:

• IBM PVU licenses
• When IT Asset Management is in 'PVU mode', responsible for sub-capacity points calculations and replacing ILMT

any override changes are effective retroactively, taken as data corrections affecting the entire reporting period. (As part of each full reconciliation, the regional peak consumption values for IBM PVU licenses are recalculated using the currently available data.)

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

Assigned chassis type

The type of chassis assigned to this inventory device. You may use the Assigned chassis type to override the value of the Inventory chassis type where the latter is missing or incorrectly reported in inventory.

Note: The following chassis types are considered portable computers eligible to be covered by a license's right of the second use:

• Laptop
• Notebook
• Other Hand Held
• Portable
• Sub Notebook
• Tablet.

Select the Assigned chassis type for the inventory device. This value is used when calculating license upgrade or downgrade rights and should therefore be set correctly.

Not available for inventory devices of the types Mobile Device or Virtual Machine.

Clock speed (MHz)

The maximum clock speed (in MHz) of the processor that is installed in the inventory device. This is the value reported in inventory, so that for virtual machines, the value of this field is as reported by the virtual machine, rather than that reported by the host server (although these values should normally be the same).

Note: Points calculations for Oracle Named User Plus and Oracle Processor licenses that take account of clock speed, reference the attribute of the host server, not of any virtual environment.

Enter the clock speed of the processor installed in the inventory device (for manually-created records). To adjust the value reported by inventory, click Override and enter or spin up the corrected value. The overridden value is static and will not be updated by future inventory gathering. The value gathered by inventory continues to display alongside the overridden value and may be restored by deleting the overridden value.

Cores

This value may be:

• For a physical device, the total number of processor cores in the inventory device (for background information, see core)
• For a virtual machine, the number of cores assigned to the VM
• For an inventory device record created to represent an Oracle Database running in Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), the current core count reported by Oracle in the uploaded inventory (and this same value is also shown as the processor count).

Note: Some special cases apply for partition-based virtualization technologies:

• For some kinds of virtualization where no host OS is available (such as LPARs on PowerPC, VPars on HP, or Solaris zones), the VM inventory returns the number of virtual cores assigned to the partition, and may also return a core count for the underlying hardware. As a result, no separate inventory is required for the host server, although IT Asset Management synthesizes a host record to group together guest systems, and to provide a host/guest model consistent with other virtualization technologies.
• For Solaris zones and LPARs, it is quite possible for the sum of virtual cores for all the VMs on a host to exceed the core count for the host itself, because virtual cores can share physical cores.
• For Solaris zones, where a processor set (pset) may use a subset of the available threads from each of multiple cores, the reported Cores value for the inventory device is the number of "touched" cores (for example, a pset taking one thread each from two different cores has "touched" two cores, and zones tied to that pset may each record those two cores).

Some software licenses take account of the number of cores in (or assigned to) the device used to run the application.

Tip: If the value for Cores is missing, the licensing impact depends on other factors:

• When this device is a Virtual machine (and except for either an Oracle Processor license applied to an application running on a Solaris zone, or a Microsoft Server/Management Core license for an application on any platform), the process checks each of the following in turn, and uses the first non-zero value found as the best available approximation for the missing count of cores on the VM:
  • The count of Processors on the Virtual machine
  • The count of Cores on the VM Host (this is equivalent to full capacity licensing)
  • The count of Processors on the VM Host (also equivalent to full capacity licensing).
• When this device is a VM Host running Solaris, and the Cores value is zero, none of the guest VMs (zones) on this host can consume from Oracle Processor licenses. The specialized calculation of consumption by each Solaris zone from an Oracle Processor license includes:

  Zone's Threads (max) / (host's Threads / host's Cores)

  Clearly, a missing value for Cores (or Threads) on the VM Host running Solaris makes correct calculation of each zone's consumption impossible for this license type on this platform.
• Similarly, no guest VMs can consume from Microsoft Server/Management Core licenses on virtual hosts missing values for Cores (or Processors), since this license is consumed based on these host values, and VMs are covered to an appropriate degree (different for the Standard and Datacenter editions).

If you are manually creating an inventory device record:

• For a physical device enter (or spin up) the total number of processor cores available in this device (across all processors).
• For a virtual machine, enter the number of cores allocated to the VM. (In VMware, for example, when you configure a virtual machine, you specify a number of virtual sockets, and a number of cores per socket. The mathematical product [sockets x cores] gives the total number of cores, also known as vCPUs, allocated in VMware to this VM.)

To adjust the value reported by inventory, click Override, and enter or spin up the corrected value. The overridden value is static and will not be updated by future inventory gathering. The value gathered by inventory continues to display alongside the overridden value and may be restored by deleting the overridden value. When this device is a Virtual machine (zone) on a host running Solaris, overriding this value has no effect on consumption from Oracle Processor licenses, which are calculated as shown above.

Disk (GB)

The total volume of hard drives installed in the inventory device, in Gigabytes.

Enter the total volume of hard drives installed in the inventory device, in Gigabytes. The value is overwritten (permanently) by incoming inventory, and thereafter is read-only.

Display adapters

The total number of display adapters installed in the inventory device.

Enter the number of display adapters installed in the inventory device. The value is overwritten (permanently) by incoming inventory, and thereafter is read-only.

Hard drives

The total number of hard drives installed in the inventory device.

Enter the number of hard drives installed in the inventory device. The value is overwritten (permanently) by incoming inventory, and thereafter is read-only.

Inventory chassis type

The chassis type of an inventory device, as reported by the inventory process.

Note: The following chassis types are considered portable computers eligible to be covered by a license's right of the second use:

• Laptop
• Notebook
• Other Hand Held
• Portable
• Sub Notebook
• Tablet.

This value cannot be edited, however you may override it with the Assigned chassis type setting.

Not available for inventory devices of the type Mobile Device and Virtual Machine.

Network cards

The total number of network cards installed in the inventory device (for a physical device); or the number of network cards accessible by a virtual machine.

Enter the total number of network cards installed in the inventory device. This value may be over-written by future incoming inventory data.

Not editable for records created from imported inventory.

Operating system

The operating system running on this device. This value is collected in inventory for discovered devices.

Enter the name of the operating system running on this device. This value may be updated by future incoming inventory data.

Not editable for records created from imported inventory.

Partial no. of processors

The equivalent number of full-time 'processors' for the virtual machine, set by the time-sharing controls on the hardware console. These 'processors' are vCPUs, and in the terminology used within IT Asset Management, this corresponds to the maximum number of cores that may be used by the virtual machine. Some virtualization technologies (such as LPARs on IBM's AIX operating system) report this setting in inventory (from an uploaded .ndi file, it is set by the first available of the VMCapacityInCores, VMCapacity, or VMEntitlement properties, and remains blank if none of these are present). This means that, in the lparstat output on AIX, the Partial no. of processors value matches:

• Online Virtual CPUs when Type is Shared and Mode is anything other than Capped
• Entitled Capacity in other cases.

Tip: If this value for the Partial no. of processors exceeds the total core count for the virtual host (as is possible with time-sharing), IT Asset Management uses the total core count in license consumption calculations (for example, for IBM PVU licenses). Putting that another way, the lesser of the host's core count or the partial number of vCPUs is used.

You may override an incorrect inventory value for this field. An overridden value is no longer updated by incoming inventory.

For core-based licensing of virtual machines, this value is used in preference to the simple core count as the licensable number of cores, except on Solaris zones (where cores are used in the calculations).

Processor type

The type of processor installed in the inventory device, for example, Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.40 GHz. The value of this field affects the license entitlement calculation for point-based licenses.

Tip: This field is not used in inventory device records that represent Oracle Database running in Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), even when you are using BYOL (transferring former on-premises license entitlements to cover the database in RDS).

Enter the type of the processor installed in the inventory device. To correct an inventory error, click Override and enter the correct type. Overridden values are no longer updated by incoming inventory data.

Processors

The total number of processors installed in a physical inventory device, or logical processors assigned to a Virtual machine. If the inventory device is representing Oracle Database running in Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), this is the current core count reported by Oracle in the uploaded inventory (and this same value is also shown as the core count).

For points-based licenses that rely on the count of processors (including Oracle Processor), consumption by this device can occur only when the Processors count is greater than zero. Similarly, consumption for Microsoft Server/Management Core licenses, including coverage for VMs, cannot be calculated if the virtual host does not have a valid count of Processors.

When you are manually creating an inventory device record, enter the total number of processors installed in this device. To correct incoming inventory, click Override and enter or spin up the correct number. Overridden values are no longer updated by inventory.

For core-based licensing of virtual machines, this value is used in preference to the simple core count as the licensable number of cores, except on Solaris zones (where cores are used in the calculations).

RAM (GB)

The size of Random Access Memory (RAM) installed in the inventory device, in gigabytes.

Enter the size of RAM installed in the inventory device, in gigabytes.

Not editable for records created from imported inventory.

Service pack

The service pack number or ID reported by the operating system. You can enter this value only while creating a new inventory device. The inventory process overwrites the manually entered value.

When you are manually creating an inventory device record, enter a service pack (SP) number or name.

Sockets

The total number of mounting sockets for central processing units (CPUs) available in the inventory device. Many inventory tools do not populate the value of this field, and you may need to enter this value manually for relevant inventory devices.

Note: This field records the total number of CPU mounting sockets, regardless of whether the sockets are empty or have CPU chips mounted in them.

Tip: This field is not used in inventory device records that represent Oracle Database running in Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), even when you are using BYOL (transferring former on-premises license entitlements to cover the database in RDS).

For relevant licenses, this number may impact consumption calculations in three ways:

• It may influence the selection of the license from which the inventory device consumes points
• It may determine which points rule is used for consumption calculations, and for Oracle licenses may also be used as a multiplier to determine the total points consumed by each device
• It may influence optimizations intended to improve the raw result of calculations.

If required for the license, this count is also used to find the ratio of cores to sockets. Where the figure is not reported (or shows a zero), the processor count for the inventory device (where available) is used as a proxy for the socket count.

Tip: On VM clusters, Oracle licenses require that you enter the total number of sockets on all hosts in the cluster.

For more details, see Handling Socket Count.

The total socket count is used for the following license types:

• Core Points
• IBM PVU
• Oracle Processor
• Oracle Named User Plus.

To override an inventory error (or a missing value), click Override and enter or spin up the correct value. If you are manually creating an inventory device record, enter the total number of CPU mounting sockets available in the inventory device (or, for Oracle on VM clusters, the total number of sockets on all hosts in the cluster).

Threads

This value is:

• For a physical inventory device, the total number of threads available across all processor cores
• For a virtual inventory device, the number of threads or logical processors (virtual processors) assigned to the device
• For an inventory device record representing Oracle Database running in Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), the CPU count returned by Oracle in inventory.

Tip: If the value for Threads is missing or zero:

• For points-based licenses that rely on the count of threads, this device cannot consume entitlements.
• When this device is a VM Host running Solaris, and the Threads value is zero, none of the guest VMs (zones) on this host can consume from Oracle Processor licenses. The specialized calculation of consumption by each Solaris zone from an Oracle Processor license includes:

  Zone's Threads (max) / (host's Threads / host's Cores)

  Clearly, a missing value for Threads (or Cores) on the VM Host makes correct calculation of each VM's consumption impossible for this license type.

When you are manually creating an inventory device record, enter (for a physical device) the total number of threads across all cores in the device, or (for a virtual device) the threads or logical/virtual processors assigned to the device. To correct a thread count, click Override and enter or spin up the correct value. Overridden values are no longer updated by incoming inventory data.