System Settings: Licensing Tab
The Licensing tab on the System Settings page enables you to specify global settings for license visibility and reconciliation. The page has the following setting:
Licenses and license counts
This section enables you relax the default access rights that control which licenses and their associated counts (entitlements, installations, usage) are visible to operators. By default, operators with scoping restrictions can see only licenses that are owned by groups in their scope. This requires that you assign the ownership appropriately for every license that is to be visible to these operators with scoping restrictions, which might become an onerous task.
If you are not using access rights to control the activities of your FlexNet Manager Suite operators, you can ignore this setting.
Select any of the following values:
- Licenses owned by their groups, with counts only for their groups — Select this option to restore the default behavior. You must assign the ownership of a license to an enterprise group that is in scope for the operator in order to make the license visible to the operator who has data access restrictions.
- Licenses owned by their groups with enterprise-wide counts — Select this option to keep the restriction on license visibility, but allow operators to see counts reflecting the license compliance (entitlements, installations, usage) for the entire enterprise. This is a useful setting if you want to limit the view of licenses but expect operators to make group assignments or individual allocations with insight into the global impacts of their decisions.
- All licenses, with counts only for their groups — Select
this option when you are not trying to hide the names of software licenses, but
want the operators with restricted scope to focus on compliance figures only for
their specified areas of responsibility. When you choose this option, you no
longer need to assign the ownership of a license for it to be visible to
operators with scoping restrictions. Tip: There is no option to allow an override view of all licenses and all counts. To achieve this full visibility, remove the access restrictions for your operators.
Reconcile
Select the Include expired licenses in reconciliation check box to include licenses that have reach their Expiry date in the license reconciliation (or license consumption calculation) process. For subscription (or other time-limited) licenses, the Expiry date is the date when the current license expires, however expired licenses may still be in use or valid which means you may want to include them in the license reconciliation process.
Clear the Include expired licenses in reconciliation check box to exclude licenses that have reached their Expiry date from the license reconciliation process.
IBM PVU sub-capacity calculation settings
This section is visible only when you have licensed FlexNet Manager for Datacenters, and only when FlexNet Manager Suite is in 'PVU mode', responsible for sub-capacity calculations of PVU points consumption (see IBM PVU Scanning).
Because the sub-capacity PVU points consumption must be calculated independently for each of three IBM regions that together cover the entire planet, dates specified in this section are taken to be from midnight in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). All regional consumption details are worked out in UTC for synchronicity.
- To manually manage roll-overs of your reporting period, select Manually set the calculation period start date. A date selector appears, where you can either type in or select your preferred start date. If you make this choice, best practice is that you return to this page and manually start the next reporting period when it falls due.
- To save the management work of resetting the date for each reporting period,
select Automatically adjust the calculation period start
date. An additional line of controls appears where you can
set both the reporting period (typically either 1 month or 3 months, in
normal IBM requirements), and the start date for the current reporting
period.Tip: Although this date picker defaults to today's date, you can freely select any date, including those within the past reporting period. This control can be set independently of the date when you started using FlexNet Manager Suite for sub-capacity points calculations (see next control for more details).
Naturally, the peak consumption values are reset for each new reporting period. For example, if your new reporting period starts January 1, then after that night's full reconciliation, each IBM region shows a peak value occurring on January 1, and those values may be unrelated to the peak values for the previous period. Only as the reporting period rolls on, and any input changes take effect, might the peak values and dates change.
Because each full reconciliation also recalculates the PVU sub-capacity consumption figures for the entire data retention period, any adjustments you need to make to the roll-over dates are taken into account at that time. For example, suppose that one IBM region had a peak value on January 2. Yesterday your reporting period was set to start on January 3, so that peak occurred in the previous reporting period. But today you corrected the reporting period to start on January 1; and after the next full reconciliation, the January 2 peak now occurs in the current period.
Ignore any value prior to: allows you to specify a switch-over date to change from reporting using ILMT to reporting using FlexNet Manager Suite, even when that switch-over occurs in the middle of an IBM reporting period. For example, suppose your reporting period runs for 3 months from January 1. On February 15, you commence production use of FlexNet Manager Suite as your sub-capacity calculator. Enter that switch-over date here. On switch-over day, prepare and archive a report from ILMT covering the period to date (January 1 to February 14). From February 15 onwards, FlexNet Manager Suite records all relevant data, and once April starts, you can prepare and archive the IBM PVU License Consumption report for the part-period February 15 to March 31. Submitting this report together with the ILMT report for the first half of the period gives complete coverage, with a clean junction at the change-over date.