On the revised IBM Sub-capacity licensing overview website, IBM pre-announced that ILMT will soon become mandatory for Products based on a Virtual Processor Core (VPC) metric.

This is particularly of interest for clients who have a Cloud Pak on a Non-containerized platforms.

If you don’t know what a Cloud Pak is: A Cloud Pak is in essence a bundle of IBM products. IBM currently provides 6 different Cloud Paks aimed at Integration, Automation, Data, Security, Application and MultiCloud Management solutions.

The Integration Cloud Pak for example contains 9 different products such as API Connect, App Connect Enterprise, MQ and DataPower Gateway each having a different license conversion ratio which also depends on if the products was deployed in Production or in a non-Production environment.

For example MQ deployed in a Production environment has a conversion ratio of 1 VPC: 4VPCs whereas MQ deployed in non-Production has a conversion ratio of 1:8.

Now, controlling your deployments and monitoring the actual usage can become difficult considering you have to take into account the different conversion ratio’s per product per environment.

 ILMT can help.

The capability to measure Cloud Paks is available since ILMT 9.2.19 released 2020 Q1. The way you bundle new components itself hasn’t changed. An additional step is required to bundle a confirmed component to the Cloud Pak. In that way, ILMT automatically takes into account the correct conversion ratio’s and provides you with an accurate view of the Cloud Pak license usage.