With more than 20,000 products and over 250 different licensing metrics, IBM software licensing is one of the most complex tasks in the market today. With so many licensing metrics it is impossible to give a full understanding of the task in one short article. So here we have outlined what are probably the main two – capacity and user-based licensing metrics.

Capacity-based

The Processor Value Unit (PVU) license metric is the most common license type for IBM server products. It is a unit of measure used to differentiate licensing of software on distributed processor technologies (defined by processor vendor, brand, type and model number). IBM continues to define a processor, for purposes of PVU-based licensing, to be each processor core on a chip (socket). Each software Program has a unique price per PVU. You can see the latest PVU look-up table here.

SOURCE: certero.com