Sub-Capacity Reporting Under Passport Advantage v11

What changed at v11

Passport Advantage v11 took effect for existing customers on May 1, 2023. The headline change for license buyers is that sub-capacity reporting and ILMT now apply to products metered in VPC (Virtual Processor Core), not only to PVU products. Manual counting of virtual cores, which some buyers had relied on for smaller deployments, is no longer permitted.

If a product is eligible for sub-capacity and you want to license only the virtual cores it uses, an approved measurement tool has to be in place and producing reports. The convenience of a spreadsheet count is gone.

The four obligations that still decide everything

Whether the product is PVU or VPC metered, the same four sub-capacity obligations apply. Miss any one of them and IBM defaults the affected period to full-capacity charging on every physical core of the host.

• An approved tool (ILMT, or an accepted alternative) deployed within 90 days of first eligible deployment.
• The tool running continuously, not switched on only ahead of a report.
• Quarterly reports generated for every eligible product.
• Those reports retained for two years and available on request.

Approved tools under v11

ILMT remains the default measurement tool. IBM also accepts HCL BigFix Inventory and Flexera One IT Asset Management as approved tools for sub-capacity. Whichever you run, it has to classify IBM products correctly and produce the report IBM expects, with a clean and continuous history behind it.

Where buyers get caught

The v11 transition created a predictable set of gaps. The products that were never core based are the ones most likely to be uninstrumented.

• VPC metered products newly in scope that were never measured by a tool.
• Reliance on legacy manual counts that v11 no longer accepts.
• Assuming a PVU focused tool covers VPC products automatically.
• Coverage gaps created during the transition itself, when nobody owned the change.

How to confirm your position

The only way to know your real exposure is to recalculate it independently: list every eligible product, confirm its metric, check that an approved tool measured it continuously, and pull the quarterly reports for the two year window. Where the evidence holds, you license virtual cores. Where it does not, you are exposed to full capacity until you can prove otherwise.