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.

Supported public clouds

The following public clouds are 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)
  • 9.2.22 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

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.

Identifying computers as running on public clouds

If a computer runs on a public cloud but is not identified as such, it has the No VM Manager Data or No Scan Data status on the Capacity Scan Health widget on the Dashboard. Subcapacity values for the software that is installed on this computer might be incorrectly calculated.

In case of IBM Power Virtual Server and IBM Cloud LinuxONE VS, the status of the computer might be OK even if the computer is not marked as a public cloud. However, its subcapacity value might still be incorrectly calculated.

To ensure that subcapacity is properly calculated, identify computers that run on public clouds and specify the types of clouds on which they run. For more information, see the following links:

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.