The 90 day clock: counting from first eligible deployment.
Sub capacity gives you 90 days to deploy ILMT, but the count does not start when you think it does. It starts at the first eligible deployment, not at purchase and not at the audit letter. Auditors reconstruct that date from your own records, and any period before ILMT was reporting can be charged at full capacity.
Where the clock actually starts
IBM requires ILMT, or an approved equivalent such as Flexera One ITAM or HCL BigFix Inventory, deployed within 90 days of the first eligible deployment. The phrase that matters is first eligible deployment. The clock starts the moment a sub capacity eligible product is first installed on eligible virtualization, where a sub capacity claim becomes possible. It does not start at the purchase order, the contract signature, or the day the audit notice arrives. Many estates assume the date is recent when the real date sits years back, in a project nobody on the current team remembers.
How auditors reconstruct the date
You will not be asked to nominate the start date. IBM rebuilds it from evidence you hand over: deployment tickets, virtual machine creation timestamps, install logs, change records and the first appearance of the product in any inventory feed. The earliest of those becomes the first eligible deployment. If your ILMT install date sits more than 90 days after that point, the gap is the exposure, and it is measured per host for the whole period the conditions were not met.
Why the gap is so expensive
The penalty is not a late fee. For any period before ILMT was deployed and reporting, the host is treated as ineligible for sub capacity, so IBM can charge the full physical capacity of that host. A product using four of 32 cores moves from 480 PVU to 3,840 PVU for the uncovered window, and the audit lookback can run 2 to 5 years. A single delayed rollout on a large host can dwarf the licence value of the software itself.
What resets and what does not
Installing ILMT today fixes the future. It does not retroactively cover the past. There is no rule that lets a present day deployment paper over a period where agents were absent. The only defence for an old gap is evidence that the conditions were in fact met, or that the deployment was not eligible in the first place, for example because it ran on ineligible virtualization where full capacity always applied and no sub capacity saving was ever claimed. Those distinctions decide the number, and they are exactly what an auditor will not draw for you.
The 90 day window is counted from your earliest eligible deployment, a date IBM reconstructs from your own records, not a date you get to choose. Find that date first, prove ILMT was reporting from inside the window, and you keep sub capacity. Leave it for the auditor to find and any uncovered period is charged at full capacity for the entire host across the whole lookback.
Not sure when your clock started?
Our ILMT Remediation engagement reconstructs your first eligible deployment dates, proves coverage from inside the window, and rebuilds a defensible sub capacity record before an auditor reads it. We mobilize within 48 hours of your audit notice.
See ILMT Remediation →The IBM Audit Brief
Audit triggers, ILMT pitfalls, and settlement tactics for IBM software buyers.
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