The IBM All Metrics Report identifies a Full Capacity value and a Subcapacity value for many titles. I have not found an explanation of how this report interprets the data. I assume the two values are used together as some installations will be licensed at the physical level and others will be licensed on the VMs; however, these numbers added together are much too high. This report shows a summary of values but no supporting data. When I calculate license consumption manually, the numbers are always much lower than this report.
Can I get the data calculations behind the report?
Is it correct to assume the Full Capacity and Subcapacity consumptions should be added together to get the total consumption?
Is there documentation on this report explaining in detail how it works?
In general, you will purchase entitlements for the lesser of the two values - Full Capacity or Sub-capacity - they don’t get added together.
Full capacity counts all the cores in the underlying physical server and multiplies it by the appropriate value from the PVU table for the processor model used by the physical server.
Sub-capacity counts the cores assigned to the VM and multiplies it by the appropriate value from the PVU table for the host’s processor model.
If your manually calculated numbers are lower than those provided by BFI, it is likely that you need to verify that the data on the Software Classification report is valid. Are the components discovered by BFI assigned to the correct products? Should some software components be suppressed? Should some software products be excluded? Are the license metrics associated with the software products correct for your entitlements?
For any given title found on multiple VMs and hosts, some installations will be licensed at the host level and some at the VM; therefore, most licenses will have both full capacity and subcapacity allocations. It is not one or the other for the enterprise.
If a licensed title is on 300 VMs running on 18 hosts (physical servers acting as nodes) in 6 VMware clusters, some of those installations will likely be licensed on the VM level and some will be licensed on the host level. The license consumption for the enterprise will have a full capacity component and a subcapacity (VM) component that combine to make up the license consumption. I do not see where BFI takes that into consideration. It seems that BFI can report theoretical full capacity consumption and theoretical consumption at the VM for the entire enterprise and report that but it does not calculate the two methods on each VM and reports the lower value. In this case, the reported theoretical full capacity is useful only as a reference of the upper limit of license consumption. It is not a true measure of license consumption based upon the parent/child relationship of each VM.
If anyone disagrees with this, please share the IBM documentation that explains it otherwise. I would really appreciate it.
Hi ITSAM,
you are basically right. Numbers shown by subcapacity reports or fullcapacity reports, does not consider, mixed evironment. It works if you have fullcapacity agreement only - then your license consumption is number listed under fullcapacity, or if you have subcapacity agreement then your license consumption number is listed under subcapacity.
However in normal circumstances, your IBM Product is always licensed by either subcapacity or fullcapacity.
It is quite rare to have one IBM Product licensed by both, fullcapacity and subcapacity.
If you have such a special case, when the same product is licensed by fullcapacity on same machines, and by subcapacity on other machines, then only option is to create two computer groups and create your reports per computer group: https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/SS8JFY_9.2.0/com.ibm.lmt.doc/Inventory/tutorials/a_subcapacity_regions_business_units.html
I need to explain the perspective from the view of license management rather than just consumption. Subcapacity consumption has a maximum limit of the consumption calculated at the physical host (VM parent). So if all the VMs under a host add up to 8,000 PVUs but the physical host is only 5,000 PVUs, then the license consumption is 5,000 PVUs. To manage this, the license is assigned to the physical host so it is obvious that additional deployments under that host do not require addtional license capacity. From the perspective of license management within an asset management system, some parent/child relationships for a given software are licensed at the child (VM/partition) while others are licensed at the parent (physical host of the VM/partition). Technically, the entire environment is subcapacity.
I think you are describing Subcapacity licensing as shown in Scenario 3 at: IBM Processor Value Unit in the BFI v10 documentation.
If so, it would seem that Inventory (and ILMT) should be accounting for this when a VM Manager is configured for the VMs and the Host they run on.
The way I see it, the counting (and license metric allocation) must be done at the VM level, but will be capped by the capacity of the underlying Host. The reason for this, it seems to me, is to allow for VM mobility, so that the PVU count associated with the VM is carried to the new host after the VM is migrated, which may, or may not have reached it’s max capacity for that particular software product.
It is not difficult to calculate license consumption on an enterprise level but I don’t know how the license metric would be allocated to the VMs yet capped at the host level. Either some VMs under a capped host would have no allocations or they would all be adjusted down by a factor so they didn’t exceed the host value. As for VM mobility, the safe alternative is to insure that all hosts for the cluster are fully licensed. This will hold as long as the enterprise has sufficient configuration management to insure the VM cannot move to another cluster without a design change which would allow the license management team to reevaluated the license consumption for the VM.
IBM calculates enterprise level consumption; however, businesses demand server level allocations so they can easily determine costs.