Full capacity exposure removed on a healthcare estate.

The provider ran WebSphere and MQ on a VMware estate that had grown faster than its license tooling. ILMT had been deployed years earlier, but agents had fallen off as hosts were rebuilt, and quarterly reports had not been retained. Sub capacity licensing lets you license only the virtual cores running IBM software rather than the whole physical host, but it depends on ILMT running continuously, with quarterly reports kept for two years.

With that evidence missing, IBM was positioned to default the count to full capacity. For middleware spread across large hosts, that gap between virtual and physical cores is where the real exposure lives. A handful of cores actually running WebSphere could be charged as every core in the cluster.

With ILMT restored and the report history rebuilt, the sub capacity claim held. The full capacity default that had loomed over the WebSphere and MQ footprint was removed, and the estate returned to licensing only the virtual cores it actually used. The provider left the engagement with a defensible posture and a monitoring routine to keep it that way.

Specific figures for this engagement are kept confidential. The result was directional but decisive: a full capacity exposure that could have run years of back charges was taken off the table.