IBM License Service
Let’s take a closer look at the IBM License Service. This is a tool that is automatically installed when deploying an IBM Cloud Pak, but requires a number of manual configurations. The terms on how to manage the license compliancy are very similar to ILMT:
- You must use License Service within 90 days of installing any eligible program that takes advantage of container licensing
- You must generate an audit report at least once per quarter
- Audit reports must be archived and stored for up to two years
- Audit reports must be made available to IBM when requested
It gets more complicated when you have a hybrid infrastructure. This is applicable for most end users since companies are starting to move their IBM workloads to containerized environments. Most workloads will remain on a traditional virtual server for now, which requires IBM’s License Metric Tool (ILMT) for “sub-capacity licensing”. This means you will need to manage and report with two different IBM tools: IBM License Metric Tool and IBM License Service Tool.
Fortunately, there is more tooling available to combine information of the tools mentioned above to present in one central dashboard. To achieve this, you need to install License Advisor. License Advisor is part of the Cloud Pak for Multicloud management and can be installed on a container. License Advisor also comes with the license sender tool which needs to be deployed on all container clusters as well as on a virtual server with access to ILMT. It collects usage information from all environments and pushes that information to License Advisor so that you have one central view of all usage information. The following illustrates this setup: