Battling IBM licensing challenges – Tip 4 of 5

Every once in a while, all ITAM managers face challenges when managing IBM licensing. To help you on your way, we have gathered 5 practical & useful tips from our webinar on managing IBM licensing in ServiceNow SAM.

Tip 4 of 5: Even customers with only 1 IBM product, need to be careful with Sub-capacity!

October 2021


Read all five tips on IBM licensing challenges:

Even organisations with the smallest environments with only 1 IBM software product run high financial risks with IBM audits, when they don’t comply with IBM Sub-capacity conditions. IBM’s default is based on Full-capacity conditions. If you do not adhere to these conditions, like installing ILMT or BigFix, and if you are not running the eligible virtualisation technology or processor technology, then you will not be eligible for Sub-capacity conditions.\


Sub-capacity metrics

  • Products priced on a per-core metric are supported for Sub-capacity pricing - there are three metrics:
  • PVU: Processor Value Unit, the most common
  • RVU MAPC: Resource Value Unit (Managed Activated Processor Core)
  • VPC: Virtual Processer Core – manual reporting is allowed (until today), but VPC will soon require ILMT
  • The most important are PVU and RVU (both are supported in ServiceNow SAM)!


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