Under this offering, programs acquired through IBM’s Passport Advantage software channel can be acquired with sub-capacity pricing. To use this pricing, however, you also have to use IBM’s Tivoli License Manager, which watches how you use the software and makes sure you stay compliant with the terms of your license agreement.
IBM is offering its WebSphere Application Server, WebSphere MQ messaging middleware, WebSphere Portal, and other WebSphere products with this sub-capacity licensing; the TXSeries transaction monitoring software as well as its DB2 Universal Database 8.2 and related software (such as DB2 Data Links Manager and Net Search Extender) can be bought using this licensing, too.
As far as platforms go, this software can run on OS/400 V5R2 and i5/OS V5R3 in logical partitions; AIX 5.1, 5.2, and 5.3 in logical partitions; on Linux on zSeries inside VM guest environments or within zSeries logical partitions; on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 and Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 and 9 on Power-based iSeries and pSeries platforms; on Solaris 8 and 9 dynamic domains (which are logical partitions that are only granular to the cell board level, not the CPU level and certainly not to the sub-CPU level); on HP-UX 11i nPar hard partitions but not on its vPar virtual partitions. IBM says it is working on sub-capacity pricing and metering mechanisms for virtual machine partitions for Windows and Linux slices on X86 servers, supporting both VMware and Microsoft Virtual Server partitions.
