Licensing for WebSphere Automation

This document provides information about licensing and entitlements for WebSphere® Automation.

Important: This Licensing Guide provides supplementary information to assist you in deploying the Programs you have licensed from IBM within your purchased entitlement. Your license agreement (such as the IBM International Program License Agreement (IPLA) or equivalent, and its transaction documents, including the License Information for WebSphere Automation 1.8) is the sole and complete agreement between you and IBM regarding use of the Program.

Listing of licenses by type

This product supports the following license metrics as a unit of measure for usage of the licensed software:

  • Virtual Processor Core (VPC)

You can learn about license metric definition and guidance at Passport Advantage / Passport Common License Types & Definitions.

These licenses are used when creating instances of the WebSphere Automation components, in the spec.license.accept field of each custom resource:

Full licenses

Full licenses provide the option to utilize any of the enumerated and entitled products including Red Hat® OpenShift® at the specified ratio consumptions.

To review the license agreements for any of the following full WebSphere Automation licenses, click the link for that license:

Table of license versions

WebSphere Automation licensing covers both production and non-production usage with a singular set of ordering parts for both distributed and IBM Z footprints.

Table 1. License versions
License Usage Description
L-LAHN-CJ8GBQ Production or nonproduction WebSphere Automation 1.8.2
L-REBM-59QT8V Production or nonproduction IBM Cloud Pak for Applications Advanced 5.3

What do you get with your purchase of WebSphere Automation, and what is your entitlement?

WebSphere Automation offers an enterprise-ready, containerized software solution for modernizing existing applications and developing new cloud-native apps that run on Red Hat OpenShift. The product is supported on Linux® x86_64 or Linux on IBM Z platform.

Licensing for WebSphere Automation is either perpetual, monthly, or a subscription license. Not all offerings or capabilities of WebSphere Automation are supported currently on Linux on Power or Linux on IBM Z. Details of which features work in which operating environment can be found on the Installation and supported products at a glance page. For more information about WebSphere Automation perpetual, monthly, and subscription licenses, see Passport Advantage Licensing Overview.

For the parts associated with the perpetual, monthly, and subscription licenses, see Ordering WebSphere Automation.

Monthly and subscription licenses for WebSphere Automation include both entitlement to use the program and the associated subscription and support entitlement. The perpetual license entitlement allows use of the program in perpetuity, but for subscription and support after the first 12 months, you must purchase Subscription and Support renewals for each year where Subscription and Support is required.

If customers with perpetual license entitlement do not renew Subscription and Support, their support access key expires, and they are no longer able to download product images from the IBM entitled registry (cp.icr,io). They therefore lose access to the product images unless they mirror the product images from the IBM entitled registry to a customer-owned registry (before Subscription and Support lapses) and configure their system to pull from this registry.

Support availability for each WebSphere Automation release follows the published support model as described in the announcement letter. For an updated view of which releases are supported and whether fixes are available for each release, review the Support page.

License ratio topics

License ratio

Entitlements of WebSphere Automation that are used in these ratios can be reused in other ratios at any time, as long as the total entitlement is not exceeded. There is no limit to the number of times that entitlements can be used in different combinations.

What consumes WebSphere Automation license entitlements according to the ratio?
Table 2. Production and non-production license ratio
Capability VPC ratio (capability : WebSphere Automation)
Red Hat OpenShift (restricted for WebSphere Automation usage only) 26:1
Note: Production and non-production usage have the same consumption ratios (for the registered WebSphere instances).

To review your WebSphere Automation entitlements and to convert them into product entitlements using the Production and non-production license ratio table, use the conversion calculator External link icon at IBM Software Central. An IBMid is required; create an account if you do not already have one. After you log in, click Conversion calculators in the main navigation panel.

Sizing a WebSphere Automation deployment

WebSphere Automation entitlement is based on the VPC entitled footprint for each registered instance of the WebSphere Application Server, WebSphere Application Server Liberty, or other supported products such as ODM.

One VPC of WebSphere Automation is required for 70 PVUs of WAS.

Example 1: Five instances of WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment on Intel (5 on Intel)
In this example, each instance of WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment is 350 PVUs, for a total of 1,750 PVUs. Each instance is registered with WebSphere Automation. Dividing 1,750 by 70 results in 25 VPCs of WebSphere Automation. This estate can be managed with one or more instances of WebSphere Automation.
Example 2: Ten instances of WebSphere Application Server (6 on Intel, 4 on z/OS)
In this example, each WebSphere Application Server instance on Intel is 210 PVUs, for a total of 1,260 PVUs on Intel. Each WebSphere Application Server instance on z/OS is 280 PVUs, for a total of 1,120 PVUs on z/OS. The total estate is therefore 1,260 + 1,120 = 2,380 PVUs. Dividing 2,380 by 70 results in 34 VPCs of WebSphere Automation. This estate can be managed with one or more instances of WebSphere Automation.

Reporting on deployment inside and across Red Hat OpenShift clusters

WebSphere Automation reporting using the virtual processor core (VPC) metric

Deployments under WebSphere Automation entitlement can continue to be deployed on the same hardware, and in the same VMs as previously measured and reported with PVUs. Recent updates to IBM License Metric Tool (ILMT) now allow it to track deployments of software programs entitled under VPCs. Use ILMT to keep track of software deployed in VMs and entitled under VPCs.

For containers under WebSphere Automation VPC entitlements, the license service available to IBM Cloud Pak deployments can be configured to report the deployments of each bundled offering in each container. It can also report the container size and how that relates—using the VPC-to-license ratio—to WebSphere Automation entitlements.

This deployment reporting is aggregated for each Red Hat OpenShift cluster to provide a high-water mark of deployment to track against customer WebSphere Automation entitlements.

For more information about the IBM Cloud Platform License Service as used by deployments of WebSphere Automation, see IBM License Service.

For information on configuring WebSphere Automation to work with IBM License Metric Tool (ILMT), see the following pages in the ILMT documentation: For information on assigning managed products to WebSphere Automation as custom bundling relations in ILMT, see the following page in the ILMT documentation:

For more information, see Tracking and reporting entitlements with IBM License Metric Tool and IBM Licensing Service

Offering-specific licenses

Red Hat OpenShift entitlements

For the purposes of this discussion, "entitlement" to the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform means the software subscription and support for the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. Restricted license entitlement means that any software subscription and support for the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform that is acquired pursuant to your WebSphere Automation license is only provided for use of the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (henceforth referred to as OpenShift), specifically for WebSphere Automation and not for non-WebSphere Automation workloads.

The entitlements for OpenShift that are included in the WebSphere Automation entitlement are restricted license entitlements. This means that the entitlements can be used only for deployments of WebSphere Automation instances, not for third-party deployments or custom code. If you deploy other code or components (such as agents used for monitoring WebSphere Automation instances), you must purchase separate OpenShift entitlements and make those available to the cluster. Otherwise, the deployment of the non-WebSphere Automation workload on those OpenShift licenses will result in those OpenShift cores, and potentially the workload itself, being unsupported.

These additional OpenShift entitlements for running non-WebSphere Automation workload must be procured separately from the OpenShift entitlements granted through IBM WebSphere Automation. The workload that you run on separately-purchased OpenShift entitlement does not need to be deployed separately from WebSphere Automation workload running on WebSphere Automation-procured OpenShift cores. But the number of separately purchased OpenShift cores must be equal to or greater than the number of cores of non-WebSphere Automation workload deployed on them in order to receive support for the complete deployment of non-WebSphere Automation workloads.

Agents for monitoring are one example of a non-WebSphere Automation workload. These agents, which run alongside the WebSphere Automation components and then send the monitoring data out to a separate monitoring server component, can be run in the same nodes and namespaces as components running in OpenShift cores using entitlements under WebSphere Automation. For all non-WebSphere Automation workloads, not just monitoring agents, ensure that you have sufficient, separately-procured software subscription and support entitlements. For more information about deploying workload in mixed clusters of OpenShift entitlements, see Restricted OpenShift entitlement for IBM Cloud Paks.

The number of VPCs of OpenShift that are included in your WebSphere Automation entitlement does not vary by the ratio of the bundled offerings which are deployed under WebSphere Automation entitlement. Therefore, the number of cores that are required for deployment of bundled offerings in WebSphere Automation can, in some scenarios, exceed the number of OpenShift cores available as part of the entitlement for WebSphere Automation. In such cases, the customer should acquire additional entitlement for OpenShift to ensure that they are always correctly licensed. Only OpenShift cores that are deployed as worker nodes count against the OpenShift entitlement.

WebSphere Automation includes IBM Cloud Pak foundational services. The IBM Cloud Pak foundational services, when deployed, also consume OpenShift entitlements.

The IBM backup policy and temporary use policy, as referenced in the International Program License Agreement, governs backups and temporary use for Red Hat products included in the Program.

IBM Storage Fusion Advanced
You are authorized to install and use IBM Storage Fusion Advanced only to support the use of WebSphere Automation. You can install and use IBM Storage Fusion Advanced under the license terms, but these components are not used to determine the number of entitlements required for using WebSphere Automation.

You

IBM Storage Fusion Data Foundation internal deployment mode only
You are permitted to use IBM Storage Fusion Data Foundation internal deployment mode only. This excludes disaster recovery, backup components, data cataloging, and advanced encryption with KMS.

Entitlement includes IBM Storage Fusion Data Foundation (FDF), but not Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation (ODF). Use of Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation with WebSphere Automation and IBM Storage Fusion software requires separate entitlement from Red Hat.