Your IBM ILMT reports are probably wrong - here's why

*IBM License Tip * Default configuration for bundling in ILMT is NEVER correct. Update to significantly reduce your costs.

Overview

When a technical team implement BigFix Inventory and ILMT the job is only half done, you still need to customise the reports to your specific deployment of IBM products. Otherwise ILMT will report your organisation are using far more PVUs than you actual are and your

Why you need to manually update ILMT

ILMT "out of the box" makes an attempt to match the component information it receives from the agents to licenseable products. This matching is very conservative and starts from a position that all servers are Production and all components require a full license.

It is then up to an organisation to manually configure ILMT to report the true license demand. Common changes would be:

• Identify supporting products (bundles) and grouping them together against one license
• Identifying non-production instances so a lower cost license can be applied
• Purging decommissioned servers from calculations
• Applying the appropriate rules for DR and Backup servers which may require no license
• VMs defaulting to higher PVU
• Co-hosted products

Each product will have different license rules that will need to be reviewed and manually adjusted in most cases.

Opportunity to reduce IBM license costs

There is a tremendous opportunity to reduce your IBM license and S&S costs if your organisation has not manually updated ILMT and has been buying licenses over the years based on these calculations.

By simply going into ILMT you can apply the various license rules retrospectively. In my experience this almost always results in a significant saving.

Does changing ILMT impact server configuration?

Updates to ILMT have not impact on the underlying inventory data from BigFix. You are not changing server or network configurations. You are simply correcting the interpretation of the data and the calculation of the PVU or RVU count to match what you have licenses for.

Is changing ILMT difficult?

Making the changes to ILMT to reduce your license requirements is not difficult. IBM provide excellent documentation on configuring ILMT. The real challenge is in understanding IBM license rules so you know what to change.

The License Information provided by IBM for each product is a good starting point. Look up the product and version and it will provide you with the license rules.

Unsure about IBM License Rules?

If you are not an expert in IBM licensing then you'll need to get advice. Making the changes although time consuming is not difficult. Knowing exactly what can be changed, based on the license rules is where you'll need help. If in doubt get help.

Conclusion

There are huge savings to be made in IBM licensing by taking the time to manually adjust ILMT to report the correct license usage in your organisation. With a little research and some careful updates to the ILMT configuration you can realise these savings with no impact to the business.

Did you find this helpful, then consider subscribing to my newsletter on the link below