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3.5 min to readPublisher Advisory Services

IBM Cloud Pak and containerization - how to manage compliancy

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Randy BalSolution Consultant for IBM Software
Publisher advisory

Red Hat Open Shift and "containerization" are important parts of the IBM strategy as explained in a previous blog. A lot of organizations are already making this transition and there are many who will follow in the future. IBM Container licensing can have a large impact on the licensing costs, as well as making license management more complex.

To explain this, let’s have a close look at the infrastructure options and how licensing should be managed for each.

  • Physical Server: When installing IBM software on a physical server, you need to look at the processor capacity of the server and buy a required number of PVU licenses per core for each core in the server. Each processor technology can lead to a different number of PVUs per core. Review requirements in the PVU table. In this scenario, there is no additional tooling required for license compliance reporting This is known as full-capacity licensing.
  • Virtual Server: When installing IBM software on a virtual server, you are only required to buy licenses for that virtual server. Other servers in the same physical server do not require licenses. In this case, the virtual cores allocated to this specific virtual server must be licensed in the same way as a physical server. For this, the IBM License Metric Tool is required for license management. This is called sub-capacity licensing.
  • Container: When installing IBM software on a container, you are only required to license the processor capacity or core capacity made available to the container. This is based on the Virtual Processor Core model (VPC). The IBM License Service tool allows you to count the fractional core capacity, which is required to manage compliancy. This is called container licensing.

The following illustrates the three scenarios:

IBM Licensing Scenarios on Physical Server, Virtual Server, Container, source: IBM

IBM software bundled in a Cloud Pak can be deployed on both physical and virtual servers. A Cloud Pak can be more cost effective when compared to PVU licensing, since the licensing and the pricing structure for Cloud Pak are different. However, the ILMT reporting terms will remain the same when a virtual server is licensed with a Cloud Pak.

IBM License Service

Let’s take a closer look at the IBM License Service. This is a tool that is automatically installed when deploying an IBM Cloud Pak, but requires a number of manual configurations. The terms on how to manage the license compliancy are very similar to ILMT:

  • You must use License Service within 90 days of installing any eligible program that takes advantage of container licensing
  • You must generate an audit report at least once per quarter
  • Audit reports must be archived and stored for up to two years
  • Audit reports must be made available to IBM when requested

It gets more complicated when you have a hybrid infrastructure. This is applicable for most end users since companies are starting to move their IBM workloads to containerized environments. Most workloads will remain on a traditional virtual server for now, which requires IBM’s License Metric Tool (ILMT) for “sub-capacity licensing”. This means you will need to manage and report with two different IBM tools: IBM License Metric Tool and IBM License Service Tool.

Fortunately, there is more tooling available to combine information of the tools mentioned above to present in one central dashboard. To achieve this, you need to install License Advisor. License Advisor is part of the Cloud Pak for Multicloud management and can be installed on a container. License Advisor also comes with the license sender tool which needs to be deployed on all container clusters as well as on a virtual server with access to ILMT. It collects usage information from all environments and pushes that information to License Advisor so that you have one central view of all usage information. The following illustrates this setup:

Cloud Pak License Advisor – Containerized environment & Traditional VM-based environment, source: IBM

License management becomes more complex

If you decide to upgrade your existing IBM entitlements to Cloud Pak and deploy on a containerized infrastructure, it is important you are aware of the compliancy terms that are applicable. Hybrid environments make it especially complex because you need to maintain multiple tools. We highly recommend that you include a compliancy management strategy in your migration plan.

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Learn how to manage your IBM compliance

IBM Container licensing can have a large impact on the licensing costs, as well as making license management more complex. Learn how you can maintain compliance and manage costs with containerization.

Learn how to manage your IBM compliance

IBM Container licensing can have a large impact on the licensing costs, as well as making license management more complex. Learn how you can maintain compliance and manage costs with containerization.

Author

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Randy Bal
Solution Consultant for IBM Software

Specialist for IBM Software Licensing and IBM License Metric Tool