[donmcronald]

The virtualization sub-licensing racket is less well known. Big companies with virtualization offerings will sell you attractive licenses based on measuring usage with a tool like ILMT. IMO it’s intentionally complicated with the goal of having people fall out of compliance. If you end up out of compliance you can be in a position where they claim you owe based on full capacity licensing (a theoretical max) and the bill is astronomical. They use that to strong arm you into buying a bunch of stuff you don’t need, especially cloud offerings.

Oracle and IBM both do it.

https://blogs.flexera.com/elo/2016/02/higher-costs-for-being...

https://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-customer-explains-aud...

[yourapostasy]

Have you run into a situation where ILMT was deployed, kept up to date, clients installed on all servers (typically injected into standard image like part of an Ansible playbook or Windows slipstream or similar), required VM hypervisor port open to ILMT, and a PWC license compliance audit (now part of IBM Global Services) still came up with a different number than ILMT and forced that upon the customer? Because if so, I'd surely like to DM with you to exchange notes, as that would be the very first time I've heard of that happening.

I'd much rather deal with IBM using ILMT than Microsoft or Oracle licensing. Every single one of my customers who have used ILMT and came through a PWC license compliance audit reported to me that the ILMT numbers were accepted as the official count, after an inspection of the customer's asset database compared with an ILMT server list showed that the ILMT clients were deployed pretty much everywhere. Flexera negotiates a special dispensation from IBM to get their numbers accepted on par with ILMT, but Flexera doesn't keep up on a timely basis (within a month or two) with ILMT's tracking of new license models issued by IBM.

It is true that if you are not using ILMT and an IBM license compliance audit team comes knocking, then your life is going to suck. Then again, IBM tells everyone in the paperwork to deploy ILMT, and they've made it as easy as possible for nearly anyone (up to about 5,000 servers) to install and run ILMT, and of course it is no-charge software. Usually only takes at most a week for most sites to install, stand up clients, get the firewall rules right (or set up procedure for updates over air-gaps), integrate into LDAP and SSO, get into backups and verify, compare results with actual licenses (what IBM calls "entitled"), etc., where the actual ILMT install itself usually only takes an hour or less using their all-in-one mode.

As far as my Microsoft and Oracle folks have told me, there is no official license management system that is written into the license contract verbiage like ILMT is into IBM's that they will accept as the official count, that short-circuits any license compliance conversations dead-right-there. If you or anyone reading this knows of any, then please point me to the tooling, as that will save me a hell of a lot of time dealing with Microsoft and Oracle.