ILMT, sub-capacity and the IBM audit cycle.

ILMT health is the audit defence.

The sub-capacity entitlement is the most consequential commercial protection inside the Passport Advantage agreement. Sub-capacity allows the buyer to license PVU-metered products at the virtual processor count rather than the physical processor count. On a modern x86 estate, the difference between the two is, on most engagements, a multiple. The sub-capacity entitlement is conditional. The condition is ILMT. ILMT installed, ILMT scanning, ILMT reports running on the documented quarterly cadence, ILMT retained for two years, ILMT covering the in-scope estate.

Where ILMT fails the conditions, sub-capacity reverts to full-capacity for the products and the periods in which the conditions fail. The cost of full-capacity reversion, on a virtualised estate that has been licensing at sub-capacity, is the deployment exposure the publisher will raise at audit. The buyer-side defence is not built at audit. The buyer-side defence is built in the ILMT operating model that has been running before the audit, and the documented evidence trail that establishes ILMT health across the audit window.

This paper covers the methodology Admodum applies inside the IBM audit cycle: the ILMT health protocol, the PVU computation defence, the RVU and instance-based metric treatment, the Passport Advantage anchoring methodology and the settlement-boundary protection. The methodology is the one that has been applied across twenty-six IBM audits in the firm’s engagement history.