IBM Common Licensing overview

IBM® Common Licensing offers a license management solution for IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management (ELM) or IBM Rational® products. With IBM Common Licensing, your organization can track or monitor licenses and evaluate the licenses of various products that organization uses. The products provide various licensing models that offer the flexibility to manage and obtain optimum license usage. The license management tools consist of web applications that help you purchase licenses, administer license servers, and prepare reports. The report presents a view of the license by product. You can prepare various useful reports to understand and analyze the product licenses usage in an organization. With different types of reports, you can prepare detailed metrics for the total number of licenses for a specified set of products. You can readily learn the expiration date of licenses for each of product.

The web-based tools of IBM Common Licensing are as follows:

IBM License Key Center to generate or return your ELM or IBM Rational product license keys.
License Key Server Administration and Reporting Toolto administer license servers and report license usage. This tool provides a consolidated list of all the license servers in your organization. Based on the license server artifacts, the reporting application creates various reports to track and report license usage.

License Key Server Administration and Reporting Tool requires License Key Server Administration Agent to be installed on the computer where license servers, such as License Key Server or ELM server, are installed. The server administration agent is installed in the WebSphere® Application Server Liberty Profile container. The server administration agent performs two key functions for the server administration and reporting tool:

It obtains status by using the lmutil command
It uses the server log file and converts the log data into the SQL records

The SQL records represent and store the license usage information in IBM Db2®, a relational database. The application connects to Db2 and parses user queries to present the data in the requested charts. The application uses IBM Rapidly Adaptive Visualization Engine (RAVE) to render the license usage data. Consider this IBM Common Licensing deployment scenario:

IBM Common Licensing deployment scenario

The main components of IBM Common Licensing are as follows:

The lmgrd license manager Daemon
The ibmratl vendor daemon
The client program, in this case an ELM or IBM Rational product
The license file

The lmgrd daemon and the vendor daemons work together to manage the license keys. The lmgrd daemon handles the initial contact with the client application programs, passing the connection on to the appropriate vendor daemon. The lmgrd daemon also starts and restarts vendor daemons. The vendor daemon tracks how many licenses are checked out and who has the licenses. The license file contains license key data for several products and is created for a specific host. The license key file is created based on the data that the IBM License Key Center provides.

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