The information provided so far is somewhat incomplete. Here are some more important points:
1. Customers that adopt Country Multiplex Pricing (CMP) no longer have Single Version Charge (SVC) term limits at all. (Yay!) Please refer to IBM announcement letter 215-230 (dated July 28, 2015) for details, or "talk with your friendly IBM representative." Note that CMP does not require more than one machine or even more than one z/OS LPAR. You can certainly be a "small" z/OS customer with even a single z/OS LPAR and single machine and still find CMP to be attractive -- maybe even especially attractive. The elimination of SVC periods should NOT (triple underscore) be interpreted as a license to run old, crusty versions "forever." Old, crusty versions will still be old and crusty, still unsupported if they're beyond their service periods. Please don't get old and crusty, at least not in this respect. Sysplex aggregation rules also disappear with CMP, by the way. [Excited yet? :)] 2. Even among those customers choosing to maintain SVC term limits (i.e. not adopt CMP), SVC term limits do not apply between Solution Edition LPARs and non-Solution Edition LPARs. For example, if you license the IBM Solution Edition for Data Warehousing with z/OS 2.2 and DB2 11 for z/OS, and you install that Solution Edition on an existing machine with z/OS 1.13 and DB2 10 for z/OS, you do not start the Single Version Charge periods for either z/OS or DB2. Each Solution Edition license is treated as a separate entity. *Within* a specific Solution Edition license the SVC term limits may apply, for example if you have two Solution Edition for Data Warehousing LPARs on one machine (or aggregated Sysplex) then those two LPARs would be within one SVC scope. My understanding is that zNALC z/OS is treated the same way. For example, if you have two zNALC z/OS LPARs and two non-zNALC z/OS LPARs on one machine, all currently running z/OS 1.13, and you upgrade one of your zNALC LPARs to z/OS 2.2, you have only started the SVC period for your zNALC LPARs, not for all z/OS LPARs. (Somebody please correct me if I'm mistaken, but that's my understanding.) Anyway, to net it out, zNALC and Solution Editions are already separate license entities, so you can think of them as separate non-aggregated machines for SVC purposes, effectively -- separate SVC "zones." 3. In general (and I cannot think of any exceptions), Early Support Program, Preview, Beta, and Trial licenses do not start SVC term limits -- at least not pre-General Availability of the new version, and perhaps not even then. (Another good reason to participate in those programs! They effectively give you elongated SVC periods. Fortune favors the brave, and in this case you don't have to be too brave.) For example, you can license the IBM Enterprise COBOL Developer Trial for z/OS without starting the SVC period for your COBOL compiler. 4. Even if you exceed your SVC period it's not the "end of the world" -- far from it. You don't "pay double" -- at least I've never seen that, unless perhaps you have full capacity licensing on every machine. (Unlikely, especially these days.) What ends up happening is that you take an additional trip on the Monthly License Charge price curve, but you don't travel as far along the curve on each trip as you did when you had one trip. For example, let's suppose you are subject to SVC terms, you exceed your SVC period, and you have both CICS Transaction Server Version 5 and CICS Transaction Server Version 3 running on the same machine. You've upgraded all but one LPAR to CICS TS Version 5, but you've got a "straggler" LPAR still running CICS TS Version 3. You have sub-capacity licensing of some type, e.g. VWLC, AWLC, AEWLC, etc. Let's suppose you have a 200 MSU machine, and your total CICS TS peak four hour rolling average is typically 160 MSUs as reported in SCRT or MWRT. OK then, before you run past your SVC period you'd be reporting 160 MSUs of CICS TS Version 5 (only) and pay for that. After running past your SVC period you'd most probably report something less than 160 MSUs of CICS TS Version 5 (i.e. your CICS TS Version 5 license charge would decrease somewhat), and "a few" MSUs of CICS TS Version 3 (i.e. your CICS TS Version 3 license charge would increase from zero to something non-zero). Yes, 145 + 15 MSUs (for example) is greater than 160 MSUs in licensing terms, but *usually* not hugely greater.(*) If you do get caught in this situation I recommend: (a) Segregating software versions (using LPARs) as best you can, setting a "softcap" (defined capacity) at least on the LPAR(s) containing your older software version(s), and getting migrated as quickly as you can; or (b) Switching to Country Multiplex Pricing; or (c) Asking your friendly IBM software representative for advice and forbearance consideration. In particular, if the delay in getting over to the new version is due to something IBM did or didn't do -- an impactful defect that IBM hasn't been able to close, as a notable example -- and if you have a realistic plan to get over to the new version once the defect is actually closed, then IBM might consider an exception. No promises, of course. (*) If you have a particular type of enterprise licensing agreement with IBM (as you probably should) and are "below caps" your bill may not change at all. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Timothy Sipples IT Architect Executive, Industry Solutions, IBM z Systems, AP/GCG/MEA E-Mail: [email protected] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
