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IBM's Software Licensing is infamously complex, with various licensing metrics resulting in millions of audit findings. With over 80 different metrics covering the whole scope of IBM's products, their metrics are notoriously challenging to navigate and license appropriately. At Connor, we can help you navigate the complexities and optimize your license agreements for a max ROI on your investment.
Over the last century, IBM has become a conglomerate of many small companies acquired through mergers and acquisitions. As a result, IBM's Software Licensing is infamously complex, with various licensing metrics resulting in millions of audit findings. With over 80 different metrics covering the whole scope of IBM's products, IBM's metrics are notoriously challenging to navigate and license appropriately.
With IBM software commonly deployed in enterprise data centers, understanding IBM's licensing metrics and compliance requirements are crucial to avoiding over-deployment of licenses and entitlements. To help you navigate IBM's license complexity, let's get to know some of the metrics and challenges associated with IBM Software Licensing.
IBM's software products are frequently deployed across the IT infrastructure and supported on multiple operating system platforms, which increases the complexity of the environment. Therefore, it is important to understand what products you are using, what the license terms are for each product, and manage the deployment of the products to avoid any discrepancies during an audit. However, because IBM understands the licensing complexity presented by the vast array of products offered, they have tried to provide educational resources to inform clients.
IBM has recognized the difficulty of understanding its product entitlements and has tried to centralize and simplify its licensing by creating the Passport Advantage (IPAA) program. Passport Advantage is a centralized program that uses a standard set of agreements, processes, and tools rather than individual contracts for each product offering. However, you cannot solely rely on Passport Advantage alone, as it does not recognize any license purchases outside of the system.
Furthermore, because Passport Advantage allows product downloads without restrictions, unmanaged downloads can expose you to over-deployment risks. You will need to present the contract or Purchase Order Entitlement (POE) to IBM for any legacy purchases. You will also need to account for product migrations to get a more complete and accurate picture of your IBM entitlements.
In addition to IPAA, IBM uses multiple other license agreements, each with its own set of terms and conditions depending on how the product is licensed or deployed. Thus, you'll want to pay close attention to any usage changes that may impact licensing across agreements.
Managing the vast deployment of IBM products is a daunting task. Still, for the most part, licensing can be categorized into one of three general buckets: user-based, capacity-based, and other licensing. The main difficulty is tracking which product goes with the appropriate licensing bucket.
Processor Value Unit (PVU)
A Processor Value Unit (PVU), introduced in 2006, is a measure used to differentiate licensing of software on distributed processor technologies (defined by processor vendor, brand, type, and model number). PVU based licensing was created to take the server's processing capacity into account to determine licensing, rather than relying solely on the number of cores (number of processors x core per processor). This change was made to account for the increased processing power of newer technologies and the gradual shift towards virtualization.
In many virtualized environments, certain cores and processors are partitioned or segmented off to be used for virtual machines. Therefore, using the PVU metric to full capacity, a virtual application that only uses 12 out of 24 cores on a server would still be licensed for all 24 cores under the PVU metric, rather than the 12 cores that are currently in use to support the application.
PVU metric calculations are by far the most complicated and have many moving variables, including the use of virtualization, processor name, server model, number of sockets, and processor model. IBM created IBM PVU tables assigning core values based on processor architecture, vendor, brand, type, model number, and the total cores. These PVU tables are publicly available on their website and show the model, processing capacity, and the associated PVU value for the general processing technologies (x86, RISC, and System Z).
Storage Value Licensing
IBM counts the deployment by tebibyte for products licensed by storage data and not the default terabyte. For reference, a terabyte is 90 percent of a tebibyte. Unfortunately, this confuses many customers as it is a nonstandard way to measure storage.
Be sure not to overlook the user-based metrics, as it is very common to over-deploy IBM's user-based software since there aren't any built-in controls to restrict software usage.
Disaster Recovery (DR) Environments
Cold and warm standby servers are not interchangeable. Therefore, you need to be careful around IBM's classification of "hot standby" systems, which are servers performing work such as mirroring of transactions, updating of files, synchronization of programs, etc. Machines determined to be running in "hot standby" mode require the appropriate software licenses from IBM.
Full Capacity Versus Sub-Capacity Licensing
To account for increased virtualization, IBM introduced licensing by sub-capacity. Instead of licensing the product for the server's full capacity (or group of servers), it instead measures its actual use in the environment. This helps to reduce unnecessary licensing fees as servers are not licensed by their full capacity or total CPU cores.
While sub-capacity is available to customers who agree to the terms and conditions of the agreement, full-capacity licensing is the default unless otherwise agreed in writing with IBM. Given the cost and processing advantage of running IBM software on virtual servers, most businesses opt to virtualize their IBM environments.
There are two requirements to be eligible for sub-capacity licensing. First, the IBM License Metric Tool (ILMT) must be installed and configured within 90 days of the first use of an eligible sub-capacity product. Second, a quarterly report must be produced through ILMT and be available to IBM upon request.
ILMT is a free tool offered by IBM to measure the metrics necessary for IBM software licensing. ILMT has several functionalities, including software discovery and identification, signature discovery, reports, license usage monitoring, and producing metrics for IBM licensing. In other words, ILMT is similar to a SAM tool built specifically for IBM's PVU based products.
The most critical licensing features of ILMT are reports, license usage monitoring, and licensing metrics. ILMT calculates the maximum core capacity of the server available to the installed IBM software and then determines the number of PVUs or other processor-core entitlements required. Given this information, ILMT can produce reports that contain a detailed summary of all the machines in your environment. These reports must be submitted to IBM to be eligible for sub-capacity licensing.
Other leading SAM tools have developed capabilities to measure IBM product use, specifically for the PVU metric. However, if used in place of ILMT, the tool outputs should be reviewed to ensure PVU calculations for both full and sub-capacity licensing are accurate, and the non-IBM solution is addresses product bundling.
Part of the challenge with ILMT is that it requires significant effort to install and configure to capture all necessary information correctly. ILMT relies on an agent installed on a target machine to report deployment data to the ILMT license server, whether physical or virtual. In cases where an agent cannot be deployed to certain enterprise systems, there needs to be a workaround process to gather the installation data from the machines.
Furthermore, many customers find that despite having ILMT installed, their coverage across the environment is incomplete, or they did not properly account for bundled software. The scans themselves can also fail, as there have been known issues with disk space, compatibility, and credentials. Be aware of these potential pitfalls when using ILMT and consult an expert as needed.
Given the complexity and dynamic nature of IBM's licensing models and technology portfolio, it is imperative to understand IBM's licensing metrics. Many customers have been subject to millions of dollars in non-compliance fees resulting from over-deployment uncovered during an IBM software audit.
While this article is not an exhaustive list of IBM licensing metrics or a complete audit defense playbook, we hope that this provides some clarity and insights around IBM's complex licensing models and ILMT to better prepare for your next software review or IBM renewal. If you would like more information on how Connor's Software Advisory Services may help reduce your vendor licensing risks and optimize IT spending, please contact us at softwareadvisoryservices@connor-consulting.com
