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License and Maintenance Expiry Question

I need help figuring this out and for the life of me it does not make sense.

As you can see in the screen shots, this shows up on my maintenance expiry list but we have clearly maintenance until 2022 which was recently processed.

So is it showing up because we lowered the maintenance number to 400 from 600?  Do I need to fix that and it will resolve it?  If so, how do I do that?  These are perpetual licenses so we do own the 600.  Do I have to split the license and move 150 from this to the other license?  If so, what is the easiest way to do that?

I hope I am making sense and if I solved my own problem with the above, then I guess great but was hoping there was something easier and would still need advice on that.

(1) Reply

Hi Kevin,

If your purchase order is for "Annual SW Subscription & Support Renewal" - like the PO IBM_4300583982 example that you provided in your first screen shot - the "Purchase type" should be set to "Software maintenance" instead of "Software", please. This maintenance PO needs to be applied to an existing (perpetual) license.

Maintenance settings for all entitlements on any given license should be consistent. Maintenance information is provided by the purchase orders linked to the license. In case maintenance settings on the linked purchase orders are not consistent - like in the second screen shot for the IBM ODM PVU license that you provided - FNMS will show the alert on the license that "All license entitlements must be covered by current maintenance" that is visible on your screen shot. Please check this KB Article on this specific alert, too.

In the fourth screenshot on the purchase orders (POs) linked to your license, you can see that this license has:

  • 100+100+250 = 450 entitlements where maintenance expired 3/31/2020
  • 150 entitlements where maintenance expired on 12/31/2019

As you suspected already, the "best practice" recommendation is to:

  1. Split your existing license into two licenses having 450 and 150 entitlements respectively. In the FNMS Web UI, in the "License Compliance > Licenses > All Licenses" view, there is a "Move maintenance" button that triggers a wizard for splitting your license and moving maintenance from one license to another one (as documented in the FNMS online help).
  2. After splitting your single license, you can apply new purchase orders for maintenance to the resulting individual licenses. Applying a maintenance PO will generally extend the maintenance period for fixed time period (like for one year), starting on the date when the old maintenance expires.

Once again, make sure that all entitlements on your license are covered by maintenance ending at the same date after applying the maintenance POs.

As an example, the PO shown in your first screen shot has a purchase quantity of 100 only. In case the total number of entitlements on your maintenance POs is lower than the number of entitlements on one perpetual license, the recommendation would be to do another split of the license.