Product:
IBM BigFix Inventory application update 9.2.6
Features:
This update contains key features that extend software discovery and enhance license reporting to help you manage and reduce software costs. The key features include:
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Enhanced discovery of Microsoft Exchange Servers to properly categorize their editions
Microsoft technical notes and best practices were applied to categorize editions of the discovered Microsoft Exchange Servers and provide a more accurate inventory and license management control.
Benefits: You can obtain an accurate inventory of Microsoft Exchange Server editions and verify how many licenses are needed for each edition to ensure license compliance. -
Reporting high water mark of Oracle Database user sessions
BigFix Inventory retrieves the number of user sessions that are registered into the Oracle Databases deployed in your environment and provides the high water mark of these sessions.
Benefits: You can use this information to visualize the number of user sessions that are executed on the Oracle Databases and to count the required licensing demand for the Oracle Named User Plus licenses. -
Metering application usage on Mac OS X
The Software Installations report includes application usage statistics for software that is installed on Mac OS X.
Benefits: You can verify whether extension of license is needed for particular software instances based on their frequency of use. -
Searching the software catalog by part number from IBM Passport Advantage
Part numbers of IBM products and associated license metrics were added to the Software Catalog report. This information facilitates the process of software classification, and allows for verifying whether a particular part number is in the current software catalog, and thus influences IBM product automated bundling.
Benefits: You can now easily verify which products are represented by the part numbers from your IBM Passport Advantage account and what license metrics they use. -
Utilization of the Install Seats metric for products discovered by SWID tags
The All Metrics report is extended to include information about the utilization of the Install Seats metric for non-IBM products that are discovered by SWID tags.
Benefits: You can see the number of installations of software that is discovered by SWID tags but for which the software catalog does not define license details. -
Support for new operating systems and virtualization technologies
You can detect software that is installed on Windows Server 2016, Ubuntu 16 for IBM Power Systems, and SUSE Linux 12 for IBM Power Systems on Little Endian Architecture. You can use XenServer and Citrix XenServer as supported virtualization technologies on selected operating systems.
Benefits: You can now perform inventory and license management for software hosted on running on the listed virtualization technologies and operating systems.
Preview features:
Preview features give you a chance to take a sneak peek at features that are currently under development and share your comments to influence the final shape of the features. While preview features evolve with every release, they are also officially supported by IBM Support.
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Reporting of physical core-based metric for Microsoft SQL Servers
This is the first part of the improvements planned to be delivered in BigFix Inventory to report utilization of core-based licenses for Microsoft products that use this license metric. Currently, the primary focus is on Microsoft SQL Server versions 2012, 2014, and 2016 (Standard and Enterprise edition).
Benefits: You can now apply proper license management for Microsoft SQL Server licenses. -
Extension of the Software Classification panel
The Software Classification panel introduces a new way of looking at software inventory and relations between the discovered components and licensable products. It provides a flat structure with software installations broken into single components, which makes it easier to view software assets and manage relations between them. The preview panel is extended with the following functions:
- Selecting the license metric of a product to which you are assigning the component
- Excluding a product or component from license calculations, for example when it is a trial version
- Viewing information about components that were installed during a specific period and their assignment
Benefits: You have a better control over which products and components are taken into account during license calculations. You can also assign a specific license metric to a product to ensure that software classification reflects your actual purchases.
Published site:
IBM BigFix Inventory - version 82.
Action to take:
- To learn how to get the application update and deploy it as well as to view the full list of new features and APARs that were fixed in this application update, see the following link: http://ibm.biz/bfi_update_926
- During the upgrade, new versions of the software catalog and PVU table are uploaded. The versions that are uploaded are the newest ones that were available during the release of the application update to which you are upgrading.
BigFix Inventory Team