September 2021
Flexera One introduced the following new features and enhancements this month.
Administration
Flexera One added the following Administration enhancement in September 2021.
Logout redirect URL for identity providers
This enhancement is available with Administration.
When you log in to Flexera One through your organization's identity provider, you will be directed to a logout redirect URL when your session ends. A Flexera One session may end when you log out or when your session expires due to inactivity. If no logout redirect URL is set, you will be directed to the Flexera One login page when your session ends. One suggested use for this feature is to set the logout redirect URL to the homepage of your organization's identity provider. An https:// URL is strongly recommended. However, an http:// URL is also valid).
When the logout redirect URL is changed, it only affects newly created sessions after the update. Any session already active during the update will not be affected by the update. To observe the changed behavior, log out of Flexera One, then log in to Flexera One again through the identity provider and when that session ends, the new logout redirect value will be active.
For further details, refer to Setting Up an Identity Provider in Flexera One for:
IT Asset Management
IT Asset Management added the following new features and enhancements in September 2021.
Three new types of hardware assets added
This enhancement is available with IT Asset Management.
In IT Asset Management, a hardware asset record can have any one of multiple asset types, and those types fall into two classes:
- Device types —So called because these assets may be linked to inventory devices
- Non-device types —These cannot be linked to inventory devices (such as a desk or telephone)
This release brings three additional non-device types that you can use to categorize your hardware assets:
- Data Storage
- Mainframe
- Network Appliance
At first glance, the Mainframe type may seem misplaced: after all, it is a type of computer, like laptops and desktops. However, the FlexNet inventory agent cannot collect inventory from mainframe computers, so that this is correctly categorized as a 'non-device' type of asset.
Fractions of points supported for IBM PVU license calculations
This enhancement is available with IT Asset Management.
Points tables in IT Asset Management have long supported decimal fractions of points used for calculating consumption in points-based licenses. From this release, when IT Asset Management is in PVU mode (responsible for sub-capacity consumption calculations for IBM PVU licenses), it correctly uses any fractional points values in calculating both current and historical peak consumption values. Rounding is not applied (so that fractional values are preserved) throughout device calculations and summing of those consumption figures within the three mandatory IBM regions. Only at the level of reporting by those regions is rounding up correctly applied, as required by IBM. (If you still have not configured those reporting regions, rounding is applied to your global total consumption.) For example, imagine that you have a negotiated points rule where each core earns 0.5 points, and consider one of the standard IBM regions where you have:
- Host1 running VM1 with 3 cores, contributing (3 x 0.5) = 1.5 points to license A
- Host2 running VM2 with 4 cores, contributing (4 x 0.5) = 2 points to license A
- The total consumption in the region is therefore (1.5 + 2) = 3.5 points, which for the regional report is finally rounded to 4 points total
Assuming this is the only region that consumes from license A, this rounded total is the final value that appears in the Compliance tab of the license properties. Similarly, the rounded regional totals are the figures used in both the IBM PVU License Consumption report (showing historical peak consumption) and the IBM PVU License Current Consumption report.
In contrast, the Consumption tab of the same license properties, which always shows the current result of the most recent compliance calculation, displays any decimal fractions in the contributions of each host to the total consumption of the license.
If you have successfully negotiated with IBM for some custom (potentially fractional) points values, you must add your own points rule to the appropriate points rule set to reflect that unique (and confidential) agreement. Remember that your locally-added points rules have precedence over those supplied through updates to the Application Recognition Library.
Three new Oracle license reports
This feature is available with IT Asset Management.
This release brings three (count them, three!) detailed new reports to help you understand and optimize your Oracle environment, including both Oracle Database instances and the various options available with them. These are:
- The Oracle Partitioning Rule Impacts report gives full details of points consumed from Oracle Processor licenses, including consuming devices in any virtualization environment (such as VMware virtual machines, IBM LPARs, Solaris Zones, Oracle VMs and the like). However, the report has a special focus on VMware vCenter clusters/networking, where it performs a "what if" comparison of the effects on points consumed of different soft partitioning rules that Oracle has brought into play over time (partitioning at the cluster, at the vCenter, or including all vCenters, together with imagining a hard partition around each ESX host server).
- The Oracle Consumption Summary by Partitioning Rule report has a similar focus, but this time including comparative costs based on either your most recent purchase price, or on the Override unit price you set in the Purchases tab of the license properties.
- The Optimum Virtualized Architecture for Oracle Options report uses just one of the Oracle rules (partitioning at the cluster) to compare costs of your current cluster architecture with an optimized structure of clusters each containing a consistent set of Oracle option installations. All relevant licenses are included in this analysis (not just the Oracle Processor license type).
Together, these reports give you the insights needed to optimize your environment, and to marshal your facts for a commercial negotiation with Oracle as your next maintenance renewal approaches.
Report optimizes subscriptions for Red Hat Enterprise Linux support
This feature is available with IT Asset Management.
A new report offers optimization of your Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions.
While Linux is free, open-source software licensed under the GNU General Public License, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is designed to be stable, with long-term support for enterprise users, and a more measured release cadence. To fund this effort, Red Hat (an independent subsidiary of IBM) contracts with customers that they purchase annual subscriptions for support of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) operating system. Two key alternative subscription models as follows:
- The Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Virtual Datacenters subscription allows you to deploy an unlimited number of VMs running RHEL on hosts with hypervisors supported by Red Hat (such as Red Hat Virtualization, VMware, and Microsoft HyperV). Instead of counting VMs, it counts the number of processors in each virtual host. Each subscription entitlement covers two processors running on a virtual host, so that for a virtual host with 8 processors, you would purchase four of these subscriptions. This subscription type is best suited for dense virtualized environments.
- The Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server subscription is best suited for physical servers, or for low-density virtual servers.
- For physical devices, one subscription is required for each pair of processor sockets in the device (except that devices with only a single socket require a separate subscription each, as the socket-pair subscriptions cannot be split across devices).
- For a virtual environment, one Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server subscription authorizes operation of two virtual machines on a host. Rounding of subscriptions is not applied at the level of the individual host (for example, a virtual host with nine VMs requires 4.5 subscriptions); but rounding up is applied finally to the enterprise-wide sum of these subscriptions.
A subtlety of these subscription models is that Red Hat requires that each cluster must be authorized in a uniform way (that is, either one, but only one, of the subscriptions may be used to authorize all installations within the cluster). For this reason, many companies choose the Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Virtual Datacenters subscription for its simplicity of authorizing any number of virtual machines. However, since the cost for each subscription entitlement is more than seven times higher for this subscription, it is often possible to optimize the structure of clusters and realize considerable savings at the next annual renewal of your subscriptions.
Enter the new Red Hat Enterprise Linux License Optimization report. The report calculates the cost of covering each cluster with each of the subscription models, and recommends the more economical subscription model for each cluster. It includes a wealth of insight into which servers contribute what processor or VM count, together with associated costs. This report does not include any specific recommendations for moving VMs to other hosts, or other changes to your cluster architecture; but armed with its insights into current costs, you can certainly experiment with your architecture, and re-run the report to see comparative results.
SaaS Management
SaaS Management added the following new feature and enhancement in September 2021.
AppExchange (Salesforce) direct integration with SaaS Management
This feature is available with SaaS Management.
AppExchange (Salesforce) is an online marketplace where Salesforce customers can add third-party SaaS applications to their Salesforce instances. See the AppExchange (Salesforce) website for a list of available applications. Flexera One’s SaaS Management now offers a direct integration with AppExchange (Salesforce) to manage the usage of Salesforce’s third-party SaaS applications.
Benefits of integrating AppExchange (Salesforce) with SaaS Management
Third-party SaaS applications are managed in AppExchange (Salesforce) using managed packages. Currently, Salesforce customers do not have visibility into the usage of all managed packages across Salesforce instances. Optimizing managed packages in Salesforce requires a cumbersome manual process.
Using SaaS Management’s direct integration with AppExchange (Salesforce), you can view your managed packages for all your Salesforce instances in one place. SaaS Management identifies users who are no longer with your company and are still assigned managed package licenses — enabling you to repurpose or reclaim these licenses to save time and money. For more information, refer to the AppExchange (Salesforce) integration instructions.
Office 365 and Office 365 Client Credentials integrations now reflect blocked users
This enhancement is available with SaaS Management.
SaaS Management’s Office 365 and Office 365 Client Credentials integrations reflect “Blocked” users in Microsoft, along with the previously shown “Active” users.