Administering product licenses

Many of the products you can use with IBM® Cloud Pak System Software for Power® require licenses. Cloud Pak System Software provides options to assist you in monitoring and administering these IBM product licenses.

Before you begin

You must be assigned the Cloud group administrator role or the Hardware administrator role with permission to Manage hardware resources (Full permission) to work with licensing.

About this task

You can administer and monitor the licenses for the products that you use with Cloud Pak System Software, such as IBM WebSphere® Application Server, DB2®, and IBM HTTP Server.

You can use license awareness to prevent exceeding your allowed licenses or to be notified if you are close to your license limit. You can also display license usage with reports generated by Cloud Pak System Software. You can also include system usage in your IBM License Metric Tool reports if you are an IBM subcapacity customer.

Users with the IBM License Metric Tool role in the Workload Management component can track server licenses on the system. However, only those users who are assigned the Cloud group administrator role or the Hardware administrator role with permission to Manage hardware resources (Full permission) can access the tool on the Cloud Pak System Software user interface. Other users must access the tool by using the REST API.

The license information is refreshed every five minutes. Changes that you make might not be reflected immediately.

Licensing is calculated as the number of virtual cores for all virtual machines x 100. For example, if the number of virtual CPUs for all virtual machines on a compute node is 16, and you multiply this number by 100, the license count for that compute node is 1120. Find the sum of all the compute nodes to get the overall system usage.