Licensing Update: Reporting PVU Compliance for HCL Domino
Since July 2019, HCL Digital Solutions has been committed to introducing modern licensing, license management, and support lifecycle practices for all our products. We know this is a journey over multiple years and we know that managing license compliance is complex. Specifically, dealing with virtualized servers and sub-capacity licensing for products on a Processor Value Unit (PVU) metric. While we intend to replace Domino PVU-based licenses with a simpler approach in the foreseeable future, we know that our customers want to know how to document their compliance with the IBM or HCL capacity-based licensing terms. Today, we are announcing that we will be consolidating our PVU compliance rules across all our products, starting with the Domino family – see “Reporting” section below for reporting methods accepted. Importantly, this announcement has no impact on any customer’s entitlements or license payments. DEFINITIONS What is Processor Value Unit licensing? A Processor Value Unit (PVU) is a unit of measure used to quantify licensing of software on different processor technologies and configurations. HCL defines a processor, for purposes of PVU-based licensing, to be each processor core on a chip (socket). Each processor core has a specific PVU capacity dependent on physical implementation as can be seen in IBM’s PVU Table by Processor Vendor, Brand, Type and Model Number here. What is Sub-Capacity licensing? A program can be deployed using either Full Capacity or Virtualization Capacity (Sub-Capacity) licensing. For Full Capacity licensing, (“bare metal”) customers need PVU entitlements to cover the entire physical server hardware where the program is running. Where Sub-Capacity (Virtual Servers) licensing is permitted, customers need PVU entitlements to cover all activated processor cores made available to the Virtual Servers used by the Program. This is normally a lower PVU count than bare-metal licensing. Likewise, Sub-Capacity licensing applies to BYOSL deployment on Public Cloud environments. REPORTING All Domino customers are required to maintain a record of their total PVUs allocated to the product. The report must be presented to HCL on request (per HCL...