Release notes for Rational Common Licensing, version 8.1.4

This document contains information about new features, system requirements, installation, and known issues for IBM® Rational® Common Licensing, version 8.1.4. It also provides information about contacting IBM Software Support.

Contents

Description

New features and enhancements

System requirements

Installing Rational Common Licensing, version 8.1.4

Known problems and limitations

Contacting IBM Software Support

Trademark acknowledgments

Description

IBM Rational Common Licensing offers a license management solution for Rational products. With Rational Common Licensing, your organization can track or monitor licenses and evaluate the licenses of various products that organization uses. The product provides 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 server administration and reporting tool is available for Rational Common Licensing, version 8.1.4. The server administration capability of the tool is for administering license servers to generate license usage reports. With the reporting capability, you can create various helpful reports that are based on license server artifacts. The generated reports helps you evaluate and track license usage for the IBM Rational products.

Rational Common Licensing, version 8.1.4 release contains updated component for Rational License Key Server, Rational License Key Administrator, and Rational License Borrow tool. The FLEXnet components that are used by Rational License Key Server for licensing are follows:
  • lmgrd [License Server daemon] = 11.10
  • ibmratl [Vendor daemon] = 11.10

This release of Rational Common Licensing includes new features, enhancements and defect fixes for the previous versions of Rational Common Licensing. See the Fix List for Rational Common Licensing for details.

New features and enhancements

Rational Common Licensing, version 8.1.4 includes two new tools: Rational License Key Server Administration and Reporting Tool introduces features to help you administer license servers and report license usage on IBM Rational products that are served by the Rational License Key Server and IBM solution for Collaborative Lifecycle Management (CLM) server.
  • The server administration application enables you to administer license servers on Windows and UNIX operating systems. For more information, see License server administration.
  • The reporting application tracks and reports license usage on IBM Rational products. For more information, see License usage reports.
Note: You cannot start or stop a CLM server by using Rational License Key Server Administration and Reporting Tool. However, reporting function is supported for CLM servers.

Installing Rational Common Licensing, version 8.1.4

The installation roadmap provides an overview of the Rational Common Licensing installation process:
  1. Before you install Rational Common Licensing, make sure that the system meets the requirements hardware, software, server environment, operating systems, and other factors.
  2. Install Rational License Key Server.
  3. (Optional) Install License Key Administrator.
  4. Install the server administration agent. The server administration agent must be collocated with a license server.
  5. Install the server administration and reporting tool.
For more information about installing Rational License Key Server, administering license servers, and license keys, see the IBM Rational Software Information Center.

System requirements

To view the operating system support and systems requirements that Rational License Key Server supports, open http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/prodguid/v1r0/clarity/osForProduct.html , and enter Rational License Key Server in the search field. After the search completes, select the version number from the list and click Submit. The following table shows the minimum system requirements to install and use Rational Common Licensing.
Table 1. System requirements to install Rational Common Licensing
Item Requirements
Web browser Rational License Key Server Administration and Reporting Tool
  • Mozilla Firefox: 10 ESR and future fixpacks
  • Internet Explorer: Version 9 or 10
    Important: Switch to Standard View (Tools > Developer tools ) to work with the server administration and reporting tool. Internet Explorer does not render the server administration and reporting tool properly in Compatibility View.
License server
  • The supported license servers are as follows:
    • Rational License Key Server: version 8.1.2 and later versions
    • CLM Server: version 4.0.1 and later versions

Known problems and limitations

Known problems and limitations are documented in individual technotes in the Support Knowledge Base. As problems are discovered and resolved, the knowledge base is updated and maintained with new information. By searching the knowledge base, you can quickly find workarounds or solutions to problems.

The known problems and limitations in the current release are as follows:
  • A single license server cannot be managed by more than one Rational License Key Server Administration and Reporting Tool.
  • Internet Explorer does not render the server administration and reporting application properly in Compatibility View.
  • The reports that are exported to CSV, TSV, XML, and JSON format contains only hourly data.
  • Double-byte characters that are used as a host name to add a license server in Rational License Key Server Administration and Reporting Tool does not identify the server. The server status is displayed as unreachable in the tool.
  • Rational License Server Agent fails to start on AIX 7.1 Technology Level 1, Service Pack 0 and 1. For more information, see the technote.
  • No validation check is performed to prevent duplicate report names with which reports are saved.
  • Restarting the license server agent from the stopRCLAgent.sh and startRCLAgent.sh script does not work with the first attempt. The startRCLAgent script displays a message that the agent is started successfully, but it remains unreachable. Restart the license server agent to make it work.
  • The installation log of Rational License Key Server Administration and Reporting Tool package shows error messages after the package is installed.
  • Rational License Key Server, version 8.1.4 rollback to Rational License Key Server, version 8.1.3 fails because of incompatible version of IBM Installation Manager on Windows operating system.
  • The oversized images truncate or corrupts, and are not displayed by the browser. The web browsers display images, which are 32,600 pixels wide or long.
  • The reports definitions are not saved as per the schedule options (daily, weekly, monthly) selected by the user. The definitions are saved as per the highlighted schedule option (daily, weekly, monthly) selected before saving the report definition.

Contacting IBM Software Support

IBM Software Support provides you with technical assistance.

For contact information and guidelines or reference materials that you need when you require support, read the IBM Software Support Handbook.

For FAQs, lists of known problems and fixes, and other support information, visit the product support page for Rational Common Licensing.

For product news, events, and other information, visit the product community page for Rational Common Licensing Support Community.

Before you contact IBM Software Support, gather the background information that you must describe your problem. When you describe a problem to an IBM Software support specialist, be as specific as possible and include all relevant background information so that the specialist can help you solve the problem efficiently. To save time, know the answers to these questions:
  • What software versions were you running when the problem occurred?
  • Do you have logs, traces, or messages that are related to the problem?
  • Can you reproduce the problem? If so, what steps do you take to reproduce it?
  • Is there a workaround for the problem? If so, be prepared to describe the workaround.

Trademark acknowledgments

IBM, the IBM logo, and ibm.com® are trademarks or registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corp., registered in many jurisdictions worldwide. Other product and service names might be trademarks of IBM or other companies. A current list of IBM trademarks is available on the web at http://www.ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml.