Planning for licensing IBM MQ in containers

Container licensing allows you to license only the available capacity of your individual IBM® MQ containers, rather than requiring you to license the entire server where your containers are running. To take advantage of container licensing, the IBM License Service must be used to track license usage and determine your required entitlement.

Note that container-based licensing is available only if you are on Red Hat® OpenShift® Container Platform or Kubernetes, including Amazon EKS. For more information, see Container licensing FAQs for more details.

To use the IBM License Service:

• If you are using the IBM MQ Operator, see the Deploy the License Service step of the IBM MQ Operator installation process that is appropriate for your platform:
  • Red Hat OpenShift.
  • Amazon EKS.
• If you are self-deploying queue managers (in other words, you are not using the IBM MQ Operator), on Kubernetes, see Installing License Service on the Kubernetes cluster in the IBM Cloud Pak® foundational services documentation.

If you are not using Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform or Kubernetes (including Amazon EKS), you must use the IBM License Metric Tool. This tool is required for metering and reporting license usage of IBM products that are deployed in traditional virtualization environments to take advantage of sub-capacity licensing. For more information, see IBM License Metric Tool documentation.