Re: Looking for experiences with the ILMT

Those of you running Informix in sub-capacity mode, I interested in your experiences with the IBM licensing tool monitoring = your environment =E2=80=94 the ILMT. Resources required A separate server or VM with a couple of cpus and a few Gig of memory should be fine. Installation As with many IBM products (although not Informix - Hurrah!) it's quite clunky to install, and is very, very much bloatware, with installations of DB2 and Websphere components also. In multiple customer environments we found it difficult to get the network teams to allow it all the access it needs, as they saw no value in the product. Ongoing administration/, experience using Once set up, it can be left to do its thing on a basis controlled by the user. I assume it's being used as a condition of Licence Compliance? AFAIAA IBM Compliance doesn't dictate frequency of reports: in our not-particularly-volatile environments we had it run monthly and IBM has accepted the reports when requested without comment. So every month you need to "sign off" a report. It's not great at distinguishing between Informix products, so in an environment that may be for example Enterprise Edition but once had Workgroup it'll likely identify the wrong one. All its errors can be corrected and annotated within the tool, but this can be very tedious if many environments need to be so altered, and the product is pretty slow anyway. It detects the maximum usage for a month, so if for example you have licences for 20 vcpus, and move them around multiple environments but always stay within the 20 at any point in time, the ILMT report will not reflect that but give you the high-watermark for each monitored VM, and thereby the possibly false conclusion in its report that you've breached your licence entitlement . Value derived etc. Its only value is in allowing the user to comply with IBM's "sub-capacity" rules and thereby benefit from IBM's exceptionally generous, by comparison with Oracle for example, rules on deploying in virtualised environments. It has zero other value whatsoever. Exemptions There are some exemptions to having to use ILMT, based upon total deployment or organisation side, which are worth checking out.