Licensing on public clouds

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Software that is installed on computers that run on public clouds is licensed according to the BYOSL policy. To ensure that license metric utilization is properly calculated for such software, computers must be identified as running on public clouds.

BYOSL policy

Software that is installed on a public cloud is licensed according to the BYOSL policy. For more information, see: Eligible Public Cloud BYOSL Policy.

Pre-approved public clouds

The following public clouds are pre-approved and supported by License Metric Tool:
  • 9.2.21 Alibaba Elastic Compute Service
  • Amazon EC2
  • Fujitsu Cloud IaaS Instance
    • 9.2.24 FJcloud-V
    • 9.2.26 FJcloud-O
  • 9.2.8 Google Compute Engine
  • 9.2.28 IBM Cloud® LinuxONE VS (full name: IBM Cloud LinuxONE Virtual Servers for VPC)
  • 9.2.36 IBM Cloud Virtual Server
  • 9.2.22 IBM® Power® Virtual Server
  • IBM SoftLayer®
  • 9.2.29 KDDI Cloud
  • Microsoft Azure
  • 9.2.23 NEC Cloud IaaS Instance
  • 9.2.33 NTT Cloud Services Division (NTT Data)
  • 9.2.25 NTT Enterprise Cloud Server
  • 9.2.28 NTT IaaS Powered by VMware
  • 9.2.19 Oracle Compute Instance
  • 9.2.22 Tencent Cloud Server Instance

To ensure that proper counting rules are applied by License Metric Tool, identify the computers that run on pre-approved public clouds and specify the types of clouds on which they run. For more information, see: Identifying computers as running on public cloud

Important: 9.2.36 Starting from application update 9.2.36, IBM SoftLayer becomes obsolete. From now on, the IBM Cloud Virtual Server type should be used for marking IBM Cloud x86 Virtual Machines.

Other public clouds

If you want to use License Metric Tool and BYOSL policy on a public cloud other than the pre-approved public clouds, there is a possibility to request approval, by writing an e-mail to talk2sam@us.ibm.com. In your request for approval, specify the exact type of the public cloud, the list of products you want to use, the approximate number of computers to manage with such public cloud, the IBM Customer Number (i.e. ICN) and country/region.

Once you obtain written approval from IBM for the specific use case, you need to configure IBM License Metric Tool accordingly to assure correct license usage calculation and stating approval details. For more information, see: Identifying computers as running on public cloud

Operating systems supported on public clouds

License Metric Tool supports the following operating systems that run on public clouds:
  • Windows
  • Linux
  • AIX
For exact versions of the operating systems, see: IBM License Metric Tool 9.2 - Supported Operating Systems. The operating systems are supported on public clouds regardless of whether the public clouds run on hypervisors that are supported or not.

Limitations

License Metric Tool does not support public cloud VMs that are identified by duplicated serial numbers. The serial number is usually the UUID of the virtual machine that is assigned by the VM manager of the particular public cloud.