IBM Tivoli License Manager
Intelligent software license
management to help
Preface
As companies worldwide continue to evolve into e-businesses, the need for enterprise solutions that facilitate IT management also continues to grow. IT management solutions are increasingly being recognized as a necessary and strategic investment.
IBM®Tivoli®License Manager provides a comprehensive solution for license
and software asset management, including a powerful technology capable of controlling software assets for customers of many sizes, within a thoroughly Web-based infrastructure (IBM Patent Pending).
The first section of this technical white paper provides an overview of the business need currently driving the investigation of enterprise license and asset management solutions, with a particular focus on software inventory and usage tracking.
Contents
3 An introduction to license management
3 Taking control of software licenses 4 A solution for license management 5 Understanding software usage
and inventory
6 Collecting software usage information 8 Looking at the whole picture
9 The IBM solution for software license management
9 An enterprise Web architecture 10 How the system works
12 The Web interface
12 The event notification system 13 A large customer example 13 Deploying Tivoli License Manager 16 Scheduling an inventory scan 16 Browsing inventory reports 20 Creating software licenses 21 Analyzing usage statistics 24 Conclusion
25 IBM software integrated solutions 25 To learn more
25 Tivoli software from IBM 26 Technical specifications
An introduction to license management
In today’s world economy, few companies can conduct business and operate efficiently without ongoing management of IT resources. For many companies, IT has become more than just a link in the production chain — it’s the key to maximizing revenue and profitability.
As technology takes on an increasingly valuable role in the successes of organizations, the IT infrastructure becomes more complex to manage and control. It requires an ongoing commitment of time and money for organizations to effectively manage, maintain and extend infrastructure. Organizations need a software solution that helps IT specialists efficiently track assets from a financial, contractual and usage point of view. An integrated view of its software assets can help an organization effectively plan for maintenance and upgrades and understand precisely which resources are needed to support business.
Software assets are a key component in the IT equation. Maintaining those software products in a large infrastructure, which can include thousands of servers and desktops, is no trivial task. An enterprise solution can help processes be streamlined and simplified through benefits such as:
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Enforcement of license agreements on procured products•
Easy access to information on required software•
Efficient usage of procured products (full usage being the ultimate goal), with support paid on only what is used•
Efficient and thorough data gathering for comprehensive cost-of-ownership analysesRealizing these benefits in a large IT infrastructure requires an ongoing collection of information about the installed and used software products. You need a system designed explicitly for asset and license management. Taking control of software licenses
Highlights
Organizations need a comprehensive license and software management solution.
or expose the company to noncompliance penalties by not purchasing required licenses. Without a licensing system, there’s no way to know whether software products are being used within the limits of existing agreements.
Optimizing your business and helping it realize significant cost savings requires you to take control of software licenses. This control can help you:
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Reduce exposure to noncompliant software usage•
Provide visibility for license reuse to potentially minimize costs and maximize usage•
Support negotiations for flexible terms with software publishers•
Reduce overall cost of software license management and compliancemonitoring
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Produce the licensing data necessary to plan for license upgrades and migrations•
Analyze the licensing data to determine if other options are more attractive License management comes into play in this area. By reconciling license procurement information with software usage and inventory data, your organization can know if it’s paying unnecessary license fees or if it should buy new licenses to avoid compliance exposure.A solution for license management
A limited number of software vendors engineer license enforcement protocols into their products, and few products on the market are “license-enabled” with standard techniques to provide reliable control over license enforcement without interruption risks. Often software products don’t provide technical support for license management activities, leaving product license manage-ment completely in the hands of the organizations buying those products. These organizations need a comprehensive license management solution to:
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Accurately identify which software products are under license and whetherthey are license-enabled by vendors. Procurement data should be used to automatically enforce the products’ license agreements and provide a repository of license and cost information.
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Allow license compliance enforcement as a customer choice, withnonintrusive and reliable techniques helping avoid application use outside of stated rules and effectively removing risk of damage to application files and data, or loss of vendor support.
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Provide reports that reconcile product usage, inventory and procurement data to give customers the integrated view of software assets they need to reduce costs.The following section discusses collecting inventory and usage data and the enterprise system features necessary for managing such a complex task. Understanding software usage and inventory
Many software vendors rely on pricing policies that calculate the number of endpoints on which their software can be installed. As a result, your number of software installations is a good starting point for determining how many licenses you need to be compliant. However, license costing for installed software goes beyond this. Some license agreements may state that a limited number of copies may be installed only on a specific subset of target machines. In other words, licensed software cannot be installed indiscriminately on all machines.
License metrics based on installation can be even more complex. For example, you might purchase software with an agreement that it can be used on all types of hardware, provided the number of processors is lower than a specified quantity or that the amount of memory megabytes doesn’t exceed a maximum value.
License type Quantity Target rules Restrictions
Simple installs 100 None None
CPU licensed 50 Serial # 1245-482-444 None
Memory restricted 12 None Less than 512MB An example of license agreements based on number of installs
the resulting aggregated reports should enable easy reconciliation of inventory and license procurement information. Software inventory scans should be repeated at regular intervals (for example, monthly or annually) to capture installed base changes and understand the necessary amendments to the license as a result of these changes.
You should understand the following basic tenets before undertaking license and asset management.
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Software identification is not simple, and the support of a reliable mechanism to detect the largest number of vendor products is necessary.•
Reconciliation between inventory and procurement often requiresaddi-tional data, which could be related to hardware inventory or asset ownership.
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License procurement and software installation data change over time; conse-quently, the information collected should be stored in a historical database.•
Centralized reporting should be available to create summary reportsinvolving thousands of machines installed in different departments.
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“Wall-to-wall” inventory wastes time and resources. You should notperform manually what machines can do automatically. Collecting software usage information
Detailed knowledge of software usage (versus software installation) helps you evaluate if your organization is making a reasonable investment in software assets. Usage statistics provide the necessary information on “who did what on which computer and when” and are the only way to know for certain if a licensed product is a good investment. This alone is reason enough to implement a procurement process that gathers usage statistics before approving purchase orders for additional software. However, concurrent licensing makes software monitoring a critical activity. A growing number of software vendors price their products based on software usage. For these vendors, knowing to what extent their products are used in a customer environment is the only way to establish the correct license.
more complex than those based on software installation. Although this docu-ment cannot provide a complete explanation of all existing metrics and policies related to concurrent licensing, the table below shows sample license agreements associated with concurrent pricing.
License type Concurrent rules
Simple concurrent No more than 70 users at the same time Capacity based No more than 4096MB of memory concurrently User bound Only user Mary Smith is allowed to use this license Multiuse based Multiple sessions on the same machine use a single license An example of license agreements based on concurrent usage
The simplest way to implement concurrent licensing is to establish a maxi-mum number of licenses that can be used concurrently by users. For example, a customer can buy 70 licenses of a CAD product and install the product on 100 machines. If pricing is based on concurrent licensing, the customer needs to verify that no more than 70 users work with an open session of the product at any given time.
Capacity licensing defines a license fee based on the power of the machine running the software. For example, a memory-based license agreement sets a maximum limit for concurrent usage based on the total amount of available memory, rather than on the number of simultaneous users. If the maximum limit is 4096MB, no more than eight machines — each one with 512MB of memory — can run the program concurrently.
Other rules may be added to a concurrent scheme to define additional behaviors, such as the number of licenses to be used for multiple sessions launched on the same machine, or a set of restrictions based on allowed users and groups. Defined rules need to be enforced at runtime or reconciled with the software usage data collected in the customer environment. This means that a system must collect software usage statistics and provide powerful reports that allow the reconciliation of installed, used and procured products. The system should also be able to enforce the license agreements as a
Highlights
Tivoli License Manager supports the software management process in both simple and complex environments.
Looking at the whole picture
Failure to carefully manage software assets and licenses can result in lost time and money, as well as the inability to free up critical resources to target additional projects. Tivoli License Manager is a powerful tool specifically designed to support the software management process with the following functions:
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Collection of software usage and inventory data, and extraction of information on products used and installed at each customer site•
Storage and maintenance of software procurement and contractinformation for products purchased by different customers or independent organizations, together with license terms and conditions
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Comparison of procured, installed and used licenses, and reconciliation of the information derived from these three different views•
Compilation of metering and inventory results to identify the license entitlement needed for each product and procure the required number of licenses for customers•
Supervision that software products are used in accordance with the agreements between customers and vendorsTivoli License Manager provides these functions through current coding technology and a Web-based architecture flexible enough to manage both simple and complex environments with a single installation. The five most important features of Tivoli License Manager, Version 1.1 are listed in the table below.
Tivoli License Manager top five features
1 Collection of realtime and historical software inventory and usage statistics 2 Comparison of installed, used and procured licenses
3 Kernel extension technique to enforce compliance without risk of applications losing data
4 Web-based solution with no client applications and administered through the Web browser
5 Web-based, three-level architecture for maximum performance and scalability
Highlights
The Tivoli solution’s Web architecture is structured to include multiple agents and servers.
The IBM solution for software license management
An enterprise Web architecture
The Tivoli License Manager solution relies on a three-tiered Web architecture composed of multiple agents and servers (shown in figure 1).
Agent
A small agent footprint (less than 400KB of executable code on all platforms) needs to be deployed on each customer machine to be monitored by Tivoli License Manager. Each agent performs the following functions silently, without user intervention:
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Executes a comprehensive scan of the target machine, providing the runtime server with the software and hardware information collected•
Identifies the starting or stopping of software products and sends this information to the runtime server so that licenses can be assigned or released at run time•
Periodically checks for a software upgrade, requiring user intervention on the target machine to be needed only the first time the code is installedWeb Browsers Agents emails demographic Runtime Server Administration Server Runtime Server Agents Mail Server External Data Source
Runtime server
For each site where Tivoli License Manager is installed, at least one runtime server must be configured, and more servers can be set up to scale the solu-tion and cover large sites. Each runtime server delivers the following funcsolu-tions:
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Provides a Web deployment service that can be used by end users to deployagents on their machines
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Receives the results of software scans from the endpoints, and processes them to build a view of the software installed on each machine•
Assigns and releases at runtime the licenses that have been distributed to the server, according to the rules defined by the license procurement information•
Monitors agent activity, notifying the system administrator when an agenthas been stopped or removed from the system Administration server
Each customer requires a dedicated or shared administration server to centrally manage Tivoli License Manager. This server provides the following functions:
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Stores and maintains available information on products and licenses ina central database organized by the customer
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Gathers the software usage and installation data collected by agents and processed by runtime servers•
Provides a Web interface that can be used to perform administrative tasks and create historical reports of license usage and product installation over time•
Forwards e-mail notifications to the license administrator upon detection of unlicensed usage of software productsHow the system works
The information about available licenses, which can be defined on a product-by-product basis, gets distributed automatically to the runtime servers and supports the process of granting licenses to the requesting agents — in realtime. Each agent detects new applications, validates available information to identify the starting product and requests an existing license from a runtime server to authorize product usage. Licenses can be controlled in realtime, with the data collected on the runtime servers used for realtime reporting and periodic reconciliation with the administration server. Several settings can be used to configure the system behavior in a detailed manner. For instance, a customer uninterested in applying license enforcement can turn off the function that requires a license to be granted to the agent before a product can start, thereby increasing performance and optimizing network communication.
Within this general framework, different policies can be defined on a product by-product basis to address different license agreements. Each policy requires a different method of processing the license information on the runtime server. This allows the granting and releasing of licenses to requesting agents with regard to the rules limiting product usage as stated by the specified settings. Product and license information flows from the administration server to the runtime servers (see figure 2), while agents download only the information required to detect the software products as they are run on the target machines. In both cases, information is updated by differences and has little impact on the network. A catalog caching technique provides each agent with only the information about products that exist within the customer environment.
product and license data usage statistics Administration Server Agent product information license requests Runtime Server
To collect software inventory information, Tivoli License Manager allows a system administrator to set the date and time of the next scheduled inventory for each department. A scan frequency can also be specified to force the agents to conduct repeated scans at regular intervals, sending the results of the scan back to the runtime servers.
Each runtime server processes the scan results and detects installed products using a catalog of thousands of software applications. The results of this process-ing activity are sent back to the administration server for historical reportprocess-ing. The Web interface
Administrative tasks are performed using the Web interface available on the administration server. The interface can also be used to browse aggregated or detailed reports on the software usage and installation data collected by Tivoli License Manager.
A Web interface is also available on each runtime server to view realtime usage reports. Both the Web and server interfaces adhere to Tivoli standards for Web-based products (see the login page shown in figure 4) and are accessible to people who have special needs, including those with disabilities. The event notification system
Both the Tivoli License Manager runtime and administration servers include a notification system to identify events requiring the attention of the system or license administrators. Servers forward these event notifications as e-mails to configurable e-mail addresses.
scheduling data inventory statistics Administration Server Agent scheduling data (targeted) scan results Runtime Server
Highlights
Runtime and administration servers notify administrators of any compliance, concurrent-user or server-availability issues.
Some events generated by Tivoli License Manager concern the realtime use of available licenses. These are useful in detecting and notifying administrators of noncompliant software usage conditions and helping identify instances when a group of users is approaching its limit in a concurrent usage enforcement model. Other events are related to service availability across the installation. For instance, Tivoli License Manager can determine if an agent is down or has been uninstalled and then forward an e-mail alert to a system administrator. Different accounts can be created for each customer, allowing multiple administrators to work with the Web interface. An e-mail address can be specified for each administrative account, and the event notification function can be turned on and off by account to define when e-mail warnings should be sent to each administrator.
A large customer example
Deploying Tivoli License Manager
Tivoli License Manager can be deployed and used to manage large organizations, such as the international ACME Inc. and its more than 10,000 employees worldwide. The organization’s installed base of servers and workstations spreads across many departments, including some shown in figure 5.
Tivoli License Manager can scale up to cover large sites by using multiple runtime servers, with each server managing an agent subset to be deployed, connected to the same centralized administration server. For the ACME example, the Tivoli License Manager solution can be deployed with the network implementation shown in figure 6.
Tivoli License Manager servers could be installed as shown in figure 6. In this example, a centralized administration server is placed within the U.S. site and connected to an IBM DB2®server. Two runtime servers are installed at the
same site to manage a large base of endpoints, and a single runtime server is configured at each remaining site, where the number of managed endpoints is lower. All servers are connected to a centralized server.
After the servers have been set up and configured, the agents must be deployed on the target workstations. A Tivoli License Manager service registration page
An international organization with more than 10,000 desktops and servers.
ACME Inc.
Administration, Research and Development 8,000 workstations
Administration Division – 80 workstations Research Division – 200 workstations Development Division – 380 workstations ... U.S. Site Manufacturing, Sales 1,000 workstations Manufacturing – 50 workstations Sales – 40 Laptops ... Italy Site Help Desk 1,000 workstations
Help Desk Division – 80 workstations ...
U.K. Site
is hosted on each runtime server for this purpose. Upon notification from the administrator, each individual can use a simple HTTP link to connect to the registration page (see figure 7).
SLMDB DB2 Database Server SLMUS1 SLM Runtime Server SLMUS1 SLM Runtime Server 8000 Workstations SLMACME SLM Admin Server U.S. Site Italy Site SLMIT1 SLM Runtime Server Workstations1000 U.K. Site SLMUK1 SLM Runtime Server Workstations1000
Figure 6: The deployment of Tivoli License Manager over a large customer example
Highlights
Administrators can schedule software inventory scans and browse the reports via a Web interface.
The page prompts the end user to enter basic information about the department or division to which the machine belongs, the name of the runtime server and a machine identifier. The machine identifier represents an asset tag that can be used to reconcile the machine information with the data that may be imported from an external system using the Tivoli License Manager data interchange capabilities.
After selecting the required information, the end user simply clicks the register button and agrees to a security statement that certified IBM software is being downloaded to the machine. At this point, the registration process silently downloads, installs and starts the agent, without the end user entering additional information or configuring anything on his or her machine. The agent restarts automatically each time the machine is rebooted and continues collecting information about used and installed products without disturbing the end user.
The agent software also includes an automatic self-update function that makes it easy to keep a significant number of workstations up to date. Without user intervention, the agent regularly checks for an update on the runtime server and silently performs the software upgrade when it’s found.
Scheduling an inventory scan
The system administrator can use a specific section of the Web interface to schedule software inventory scans of managed machines. The scheduling page (shown in figure 8) allows the administrator to set a date and time for the next inventory scan by division and specify a scan frequency for the agent to regularly refresh the inventory information stored on the administration server. In the ACME example, the Tivoli License Manager administrator can use the Web interface hosted on the administration server to schedule separate inventory scans for the administration and research divisions. A different scan date, time and frequency can be specified for each, depending on the need to maintain up-to-date inventory information for each division on the administration server.
Browsing inventory reports
used to restrict the search for inventory information to a subset of products, vendors, platforms or machines. A date and time for inspection of historical data can also be specified.
For instance, to know how many Microsoft®product images are installed in the
development division, if a U.S. site administrator needs to restrict the search
Figure 8: The scheduling page for software inventory
to products of the software vendor “Microsoft” and to agents deployed in the division “development.” The selections needed to do this are shown in figure 9. Having made the required selections, the administrator can further restrict the search by using the second page of the wizard, which shows only the products and agents matching the choices entered on the previous page. On the second page, the date and time for the data to be presented in the report can also be specified.
If an administrator opts to have a report aggregated by product, a page appears with each Microsoft product name, version, platform and category, as well as a list of agents that detected the products during an inventory scan. For example, figure 10 shows Microsoft®Outlook 2000 installed on one
machine and Microsoft Outlook Express 5.5 installed on two machines.
For each agent detecting the products included in the report, information is shown about the hostname of the machine, its division, the node to which the agent has been deployed and the scan time. More information about the machine and the detecting agent can be found in a separate section of the Web interface.
The software inventory section of the Web interface also can be used to create a comprehensive view of the software installed on one or more machines and belonging to one or more of the divisions defined for a customer. For instance, to see all products for vendor Microsoft by machine, a U.S. administrator must specify the same choices as above and enter the option of a report by agent to be shown. In this case, the inventory report appears as shown in figure 11.
Highlights
Tivoli License Manager administers licenses and meters software according to customer-defined license pools.
Creating software licenses
Administration of licenses and metering of software within Tivoli License Manager is based on the license pools defined by the customer on a product-by-product basis. Each license pool is a set of rules applied when an agent detects that an application has been opened on the endpoint it’s monitoring. The information specified for a license pool includes the number of licenses available, limitations on the availability of the license pools to specified users and nodes, and rules that control allocation of licenses when the limit is reached. The customer can either define a license pool to enforce an existing license agreement or let Tivoli License Manager monitor software usage with a default set of rules without applying limits. By default, licenses are available to users on the monitored endpoints. However, it’s possible to limit the license pool availability to selected users if necessary.
License pools are defined through the administration server’s Web interface and deployed to the appropriate runtime servers. The license pool for a product is accessed when the agent communicates to the runtime server that the monitored application has been opened.
Availability is checked, and the license is allocated or refused accordingly. If the application closes, the agent communicates with the runtime server and the license is released. If the customer chooses to use Tivoli License Manager only for usage metering, without enforcing compliance, the server response wait can be removed to improve performance.
Figure 12 shows an example of the set of rules available for each license pool. This is the license pool that an administrator should create if customer ACME owns 50 licenses of Exceed for Microsoft Windows®and allows only machines
in the development and marketing divisions to use them.
Highlights
The solution delivers realtime and historical usage reporting and includes a set of preconfigured reports for software usage data analysis.
Analyzing usage statistics
Tivoli License Manager provides both realtime and historical usage reporting. Realtime usage reports can be inspected using a browser pointed to a specific runtime server and focused on products in use at the time the report is built. Historical reports are available on the administration server, and the usage infor-mation can be browsed in several ways. Tivoli License Manager includes a set of preconfigured reports for analysis of collected software usage data, including:
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The snapshot of software usage provides information about product usagefor a specific date and time, reconciled to inventory and procurement data.
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The usage trend analysis can be used to inspect the trend of softwareusage for a selected product across a period of time.
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The usage level analysis report is specifically designed to provide support in finding unused or the most used products.For example, figure 13 illustrates the usage trend analysis report for Microsoft Internet Explorer®6.0 across a timeframe of three working days.
The license administrator can use a snapshot report to reconcile the product usage data to the procurement and inventory information. For instance, by using a wizard similar to the one available to create software inventory reports, a license administrator can create a usage snapshot for a selected date and time, including a summary view of the procured, used and installed licenses for Microsoft products (see figure 14).
The report can be navigated to jump to the details of software procurement, inventory and installation data. For example, the detailed list of user sessions for Microsoft Internet Explorer looks like the one shown in figure 15. For each session, the detail shows the hostname of the machine that runs the application, the user and group name of the individual using the product, the grant date and the relative quantity of licenses in use.
The next example shows how to use the usage level analysis to find products that are not used often and might be candidates for discontinuing the license. Using a dedicated section of the Web interface, an ACME license adminis-trator can look for Microsoft products that have not been used more than 10 times over the last month.
Figure 14: A usage snapshot report
The usage level analysis provides a wizard to find products close to a specified level of usage in a defined timeframe. This is expressed as a comparison between the maximum (or average) concurrent usage and a custom value. An example of a query result is shown in figure 16.
Conclusion
Tivoli License Manager can enable you to optimize the business value of your software licenses by paying for only those licenses that help you maintain peak productivity, while cutting costs of unused or underused licenses. The key to this strategy is knowing what applications your business uses, who uses them and how frequently they use the applications. Armed with this knowledge, your company can renegotiate license contracts based on specific needs, enable the right employees access and enforce license contracts to avoid penalties. Tivoli License Manager can also help your business reduce support costs by targeting IT staff training based on used applications, helping protect your infrastructure by preventing targeted applications (such as peer-to-peer
sharing applications) from running and tracking usage of custom applications to focus upgrades and development planning.
The bottom line — Tivoli License Manager can help your business do more with its limited resources.
IBM software integrated solutions
Tivoli License Manager supports a wealth of other offerings from IBM software. IBM software solutions can give you the power to achieve your priority business and IT goals.
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DB2Gives you the most advanced self-managing database in the world
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Lotus®Offers the instant collaboration and communication capabilities for an on demand world
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Rational®Provides best practices and tools for developing new software and customizing existing applications
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TivoliHelps you manage the complexity of an integrated, on demand operating environment
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WebSphere®Provides the must-have, open standards architecture for the on demand era
To learn more
For information about IBM Tivoli License Manager and integrated solutions from IBM, contact your IBM sales representative or visit ibm.com/tivoli/solutions/co
Tivoli software from IBM
Technical specifications
Please note that network communication is based completely on HTTP protocol and takes place on a configurable port (80 by default, or 443 if SSL is enabled).
Tivoli License Manager software prerequisites Administration server and runtime Server
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IBM HTTP Server 1.3.19.3 or 1.3.12.6•
Microsoft Internet Information Server 5.0•
IBM WebSphere Application Server Advanced Edition 4.0.4 or 3.5.6•
DB2 Enterprise Edition 7.2.5 (7.2 with fixpack 7)Web Interface
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Internet Explorer 5.5 or later or•
Netscape®Navigator®4.7x, 6.2 or laterTivoli License Manager servers and agents can be installed on many common Windows and UNIX®platforms. Other platforms will be supported in the next release.
Supported platforms
Administration server and runtime Server
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Windows NT 4, Windows 2000 Server or IBM AIX®4.3.3, 5.1 Agent•
Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows NT 4, Windows 2000 or•
Linux®Red Hat 7.0 for Intel®(kernel 2.2.16-22) or•
Linux SuSE 7.0 for IBM S390®(kernel 2.2.16) or•
Linux Red Hat 7.2 for S390 (kernel 2.4.9-17) or•
Sun OS 5.7/5.8 (64 bit) orWebSphere, xSeries, z/OS and zSeries are trademarks or registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries or both. Rational is a registered trademark of Rational Software Corporation in the United States, other countries or both.
Intel is a registered trademark of Intel Corporation in the United States, other countries or both. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. Microsoft, Windows and Windows NT are regis-tered trademarks of the Microsoft Corporation in the United States, other countries or both. UNIX is a registered trademark of the Open Company in the United States and other countries. Other company, product and service names may be the trademarks or service marks of others. The Tivoli home page on the Internet can be found at ibm.com/tivoli
The IBM home page on the Internet can be found at ibm.com
