Passport Advantage v11 and the VPC sub capacity change.

The version 11 update to the Passport Advantage agreement extended sub-capacity reporting and ILMT obligations to products metered in Virtual Processor Cores. Manual counting is no longer permitted for those products, and estates that never set up tooling for VPC now carry a reporting gap that an audit will find.

What version 11 changed

Sub-capacity licensing has long depended on the IBM License Metric Tool to prove that you ran less than the full physical capacity. Historically that obligation centered on Processor Value Unit products. The version 11 Passport Advantage terms, which took effect for existing customers from May 1 2023, brought Virtual Processor Core metered products into the same regime. The practical headline is that manual counting is no longer permitted for those VPC products. The metered number now has to come from an approved tool, not a spreadsheet.

This matters because many buyers adopted VPC products, including Cloud Pak packaging, before the reporting obligation was tightened, and treated VPC as a simpler manual count. Under v11 that manual count is no longer an acceptable basis, and the absence of tool generated reports for the period reads the same way a lapsed ILMT deployment reads for PVU products.

The audit risk this creates

• VPC products in production with no License Service or ILMT history for the v11 period.
• Manual VPC counts kept in spreadsheets that no longer satisfy the reporting requirement.
• Sub-capacity claimed for VPC products without the continuous reporting that now backs it.
• A contract that rolled to v11 terms at renewal without the estate being re tooled to match.

When the reporting basis for a VPC product is manual or missing, the same fallback applies that governs the rest of the IBM stack: without the tool generated evidence of the lower number, the higher capacity figure is what the audit asserts.

How we defend a v11 position

Establish which terms govern

The first question is which Passport Advantage version actually governs each entitlement, because that determines what reporting was required and when. We read the agreement and the Proof of Entitlement record together so the obligation is pinned to the right version, then test the estate against that obligation rather than a blanket assumption.

Reconstruct the metered record

Where tooling was late or absent, we work to reconstruct a defensible VPC position from the available data and fold the reporting remediation into the response. Closing the gap on a clear timeline strengthens the hand at the table, which is where settlement negotiation turns a reporting lapse into a managed outcome rather than a full capacity charge.