FlexNet Manager Suite On-Premises 2022 R2 is available

jborchers · ‎Dec 12, 2022

FlexNet Manager Suite On-Premises 2022 R2 is available

We are proud and excited to announce the FlexNet Manager Suite on-Premises 2022 R2 release. This article briefly highlights the new features, enhancements and refers to further documentation.

New Features

Item

Description

SAM Hubs and the SAM Optimization Hub

The SAM Optimization Hub is the first SAM Hub to be released for FlexNet Manager Suite. The SAM Optimization Hub provides analysis on achieved and potential license savings, aggregating the data from the various optimization reports explained in the SAM Optimization Hub Online Help.

Intelligent License Restriction

The Intelligent License Restriction feature, licenses can be linked to Device Groups or User Groups to minimize the manual efforts of allocating devices to licenses defined in reports.

Applying this restriction, empowers SAM managers to influence the scope of license coverage in a more automated way, and prevents spending large amounts of time manually allocating license consumptions.

Oracle Java has been added to Oracle GLAS evidence archive

The FlexNet inventory agent can regularly return additional information on the Java installations found on the system being scanned as well as uploading special files required for review by the Oracle Global Licensing and Advisory Services (GLAS) to check your compliance with license terms and conditions.

There are two new controls added in FlexNet Manager Suite to manage this data flow:

Enable collection of Oracle Java audit data check box authorizes your updated FlexNet inventory agents to start collecting and uploading the Oracle Java data, as part of their normal upload cycle.
Include Oracle Java check box adds the information about Oracle Java into the standard OracleGLASEvidence.zip archive.

Named User Licenses Consumption and Optimization report

The Named User Licenses Consumption and Optimization Report allows Software Asset Managers to actively track subscriptions for installed applications, and returns license consumption for all named user licenses.

This report brings a summarized view, per user consumption that provides all details to understand the consumptions: installed and used applications consuming the license.

Beyond Software Asset Management data transparency, the report computes optimization recommendations assessing each user(s) with an active subscription against lower cost subscriptions from the same Publisher, for installed and used applications.

IBM VPC license consumption reports

This release includes two additional reports that can be saved/archived in the same way as the IBM Cloud Pak license consumption reports:

The IBM VPC License Consumption report is an audit report that displays the consumption details of all VPC-licensed IBM products that are not bundled, for a given reporting period.
The IBM VPC License Current Consumption report displays the consumption details of all VPC-licensed IBM products that are not bundled, and were being consumed at the time of the most recent full inventory import and license reconciliation.

Microsoft Windows Server Optimization Flat View Report

This report provides a flat view for the VMs, Hosts and Computers along with their optimal Windows Server or Core Infrastructure Server licenses and useful information (highest Windows Server version in cluster, peak number of VMs…).

The aim of this report is to assist SAM Managers using Business Adapter Studio to perform a batch allocation of computers to their respective optimal licenses.

VMs Inventory Gaps From vCenter report

The VMs Inventory Gaps From vCenters report returns and displays all virtual machines (VMs) and corresponding inventory status from a vCenter import.

The report groups the inventoried VMs information (including their vCenter) with the awaiting inventory ones, providing an opportunity for SAM Managers to contact the operation team(s) and request the deployment of inventory agents for VMs that are yet to be inventoried.

Licenses Compliance and Unlicensed Product Risks report

This report is available which contains all license consumptions together with the unlicensed installations of commercial products. This report can help users to better understand their licenses compliance and to notice the "under the radar" installed commercial applications without flipping from all licenses to unlicensed installations screens.

Digitally-signed package for IBM license consumption reports

FlexNet Manager Suite now provides the digitally-signed report package for the following reports:

IBM Cloud Pak consumption report
IBM PVU license consumption report
IBM VPC license consumption report

The package can be used as a trusted source for audit as the data contained in the package can be validated for authenticity.

Each package contains the following data:

IBM Cloud Pak license consumption report
IBM PVU license consumption report
IBM VPC license consumption report
Report summary
Checksums

Remote Usage For Streamed Commercial Applications report

This report sizes the “per device” license consumption risk on Citrix and RDS Windows streaming servers by correlating, user by user, the usage on streaming servers (based on file usage) and the usage in the same 90-day period of the remote access application.

Citrix Cloud adapter for collecting non-persistent VDI data

The new Citrix Cloud adapter, non-persistent VDI data can be imported from Citrix Cloud into FlexNet Manager Suite and processed automatically.

Collected VDI data consists of:

Existing VDI devices and templates
Existing delivery groups where these VDI devices and templates are installed
What user groups have access to these delivery groups.

Property "Changed PVU per core" in IBM PVU license consumption reports

A new property Changed PVU per core is now available in the IBM PVU License Consumption and IBM PVU License Current Consumption report pages. This property helps the user to easily identify whether the user-customized points rule sets or the Flexera-published points rule sets have been used in the license consumption calculation.

Support for Kubernetes/OpenShift inventory running on Linux on IBM Z (z/VM, KVM) s390x

The Flexera Kubernetes inventory agent now supports Kubernetes/OpenShift on Linux operating systems running on the IBM Z z/VM and KVM s390 architecture -also known as "System z", "zSystems", or "z/Architecture", which is a mainframe architecture developed and supported by IBM.

Instances of JBoss can now be discovered in your environment using the FlexNet inventory agent

The inventory capabilities of the FlexNet inventory agent have been extended to detect the installation of the following Red Hat JBoss and middleware applications:

JBoss Enterprise Application Platform
JBoss Web Server
Decision Manager
Fuse

To take advantage of this enhancement, upgrade the FlexNet inventory agent to version 19.0.

Enhancements

Item	Description
Enhancements have been made to the Optimization reports	The Windows Server Optimization reports include the possibility to use the new "Per VM" licensing for Windows Server Standard implemented in October by Microsoft. The Optimum Virtualized Architecture for Oracle Options now computes the financial savings allowed between the current architecture and the recommended architecture for Oracle Database Enterprise and Oracle Options. The two reports that make a "what if" analysis on soft partitioning: Oracle Consumption Summary by Partitioning Rule and the Oracle Partitioning Rule Impacts have been extended to include a new angle: Partitioning applied taking into account the VMs affinity rules.
User data imported from Active Directory now returns email address key for SaaS user normalization	SaaS products like O365 and Salesforce do include email addresses when importing user data into FlexNet Manager Suite. Prior to this release, user data imported by Active Directory did not include email addresses so it was not possible to check if users brought into the system via Active Directory already existed, therefore resulting in the duplication of user records. On upgrading to this release, users brought into FlexNet Manager Suite from multiple sources will now be merged correctly without the risk of creating duplicates. In addition, extra steps have been added to the current merge logic to detect and delete duplicates that already exist.
Two additional tabs (VDIs, AD Groups) have been added to the Virtual Desktop Template Properties page	The VDIs tab was extended and displays a list of deployed VDIs from a template as reported in the most recent software inventory. The following fields are included: Access Mode Chosen for evidence Domain Group Site VDI device The AD Groups tab displays a list of Active Directory groups and users who have been given access to a desktop pool. The following fields are included: Domain name Domain flat name Name SID VDI Group
16 new columns are available in the reporting objects	Reporting has been enhanced with new columns in existing objects. Most requested: “Server” flag Last Inventory Date (days) for inventory devices vCenter IP address for clusters Installation date for installation
The agent has been extended to recognize different editions of the Adobe Acrobat DC desktop application	The inventory capabilities of the agent have been extended to detect different editions of Adobe Acrobat DC (Professional, Standard and Reader) on desktop machines. This new functionality has been added to the InventorySettings.xml file and was delivered to all customers by means of an ARL release. Note: This extended agent enhancement only supports Windows 10 and Windows 11 desktops. The agent has been extended based on recent installer changes made by Adobe and impacts Adobe Acrobat DC versions 2021 and later.
Enhancement of the FlexNet inventory agent to detect the edition of SQL Server Reporting Services that is installed stand-alone	Previously, if the SQL Server Reporting Services was installed stand-alone and separate from the SQL Server Database installation, the edition of this stand-alone installation would not be reported. From this release, the FlexNet inventory agent detects and reports the edition of the SQL Server Reporting Services that is installed stand-alone.
AWS account ID values can now be imported to inventory device records	This enhancement allows AWS account ID values gathered by the ndtrack from the AWS API, to be imported to the "Account" field in the cloud service provider properties. This enhancement helps easily map imported instance ID details and to make sense of large volumes of AWS instance data. Instance IDs are useful when combined with an AWS account ID, but in the absence of an account ID they are insignificant, meaning data concerning short-lived instances in FlexNet Manager Suite cannot be mapped to anything plausible to AWS administrators.
Imported Google Compute Engine devices recognized as Virtual Machines	Previously all devices imported from Google Compute Engine were recognized as Computer in the Inventory device type drop down in the Inventory Device Properties page. This is no longer the case. Now devices imported from Google Compute Engine, are now correctly recognized as Virtual Machine(s).
Option to exclude evidence of Oracle database instances from the audit report	The Inventory tab on the System Settings page now has a new check box Include Oracle database instances. This check box is selected by default. However, when the evidence of Oracle database instances should be excluded from the GLAS audit report, this check box can be deselected.
"Product" filter for generating Application Transparency reports	The Application Transparency report has been enhanced. The new Product search field on the top left corner of the Application Transparency Report page can be used to pre-filter the records by a selected product name and only the records associated with that product will be displayed.
Email and Account name columns added to Consumption tab	Two additional columns have been added to the Consumption tab within License Properties: Email address for the user who is consuming User account name that corresponds to a specific user that is used to log into the system
Nlog has replaced log4net for configuring logging levels in IT Asset Management	The log4net assembly will no longer be released with FlexNet Manager Suite, and has been replaced by Nlog. NLog is a logging platform that writes to several different targets (database, file, console) and allows users to change logging configuration on an ad hoc basis. Note: The Nlog upgrade impacts the logs that are generated on the beacon only, and not the agent. No logging changes have been made to the agent. Customers do not need to perform any new actions concerning this upgrade. For more information on how Nlog works , see Configure logging levels with Nlog in the online help. For information on configuring Nlog advanced settings, visit the Configuration options page on Nlog's documentation site.
Collect only relevant file evidence to accelerate reconcile processing	The overnight inventory processing time is often increasing and one of the biggest time consumers is file evidence import. A lot of files evidence is imported which do not help identify the applications that are installed on the machine. In case of Unix devices, the evidence which are useful for application recognition are only around 2%. With this release, FlexNet Manager Suite will be filtering out those evidence which are not useful in the resolver phase, while importing the device data into the Inventory database. This will help reduce the time taken for the overnight inventory processing. This filtering feature can be enabled using the setting flag 'UnixFileEvidenceGatheringMode' (ComplianceTenantSetting ID: 240). This flag has 3 values: all: Import all Unix evidence into IM from the NDI. arl-only: Automatically exclude Unix file evidence which is not in the ARL. arl-and-specific-extensions: (Default) Include Unix file evidence which matches rules in the ARL, or ends with one of the following extensions: '.exe', '.sys', 'sys2', 'wtag', 'ptag', '.lax', 'dtag', '.sig', 'java'. The default value for this flag is set to 'arl-and-specific-extensions'.

Changes & Fixes

In addition to the new features and enhancements, known issues have been solved and security-related changes have been made. The following link provides the list of known issues fixed in this release.