Arguments Against ILMT – What Does And Doesn't Work?

Each of the major software publishers has one or two tricks up its sleeve – tricks that often are missed by licensees – affecting how its server products may be used in virtualized environments. For example, Microsoft SQL Server requires a minimum of four core licenses per vCPU, even if the actual number of vCPUs allocated to a VM is less than four. Oracle offers even more pitfalls for the unwary, in that it strictly – some would say unreasonably – limits and defines the specific virtualization technologies that may be used to license its products based on virtual resources (as opposed to host resources).

Falling somewhere between those two extremes is IBM.

IBM allows a wide array of its products to be licensed on a "sub-capacity" basis, and it also allows for a wide array of virtualization and processor technologies to be used to support sub-capacity-licensed virtualization environments. Moreover, while its Processor Value Unit (PVU) framework entails