Eligible Public Cloud BYOSL
Catalog row in Vendor License Programs · Cited
- Kind
- Cloud policy
- Term
- Policy overlay; does not modify governing license agreements. Change log March 2024.
- Aliases
- BYOSL; EPC BYOSL
- Definition
- IBM Eligible Public Cloud BYOSL Policy (retrieved 2026-08-31): “The Eligible Public Cloud Bring Your Own Software License (BYOSL) policy allows you to deploy and execute on an Eligible Public Cloud (EPC) any IBM software licensed to you directly or through an authorized IBM reseller under IBM license terms, subject to the use authorizations and restrictions stated in the applicable governing license agreements and transaction documents for such software including the Client Relationship Agreement and the License Information documents applicable to the software.” “This policy does not apply to IBM z/OS software or to any IBM software sublicensed to you by a third party. This policy also does not apply if you are an IBM Business Partner authorized to deploy your solution on a hosted environment – such situations are handled under a separate arrangement.” “The Eligible Public Cloud BYOSL policy does not modify or supersede any obligations in the applicable governing license agreements, including requirements for licensed software use in a virtualized environment as defined in the sub-capacity and container licensing policies.”
- Commercial rules
- When an entitlement is used under this policy: “you may not use such entitlements for any other purpose or in any other place at the same time.” Required IBM Licensing Tools “are mandatory only when deploying capacity-based products (i.e., those licensed using Processor Value Unit (PVU) or Virtual Processor Core (VPC) metrics)”: ILMT for traditional deployments; IBM License Service for containers / OpenShift / Kubernetes as tabled per offering. ILMT and License Service are tools, not programs. Named EPCs (IBM’s table only): IBM Cloud Virtual Servers (inc. IBM z/LinuxONE), IBM Cloud Containers, IBM Power Virtual Server, IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers, IBM Kubernetes Service (IKS), Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud; Alibaba Cloud (Elastic Compute Service); AWS ECS Fargate, RDS for Db2, EC2 Instances & Dedicated Instances (inc. AWS Outpost), EKS, ROSA, VMware Cloud on AWS; Fujitsu Cloud IaaS (FJcloud-V, FJcloud-O), NIFCLOUD; Google Compute Engine, GKE, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform on GCP; IONOS Compute Engine; KDDI Cloud platform service; Microsoft Azure HCI, Azure Virtual Machines, Azure VMware Solution, Azure Kubernetes, Azure Red Hat OpenShift (ARO); NEC Cloud Infrastructure Service; NTT Multicloud Services (VMs only), ECL 1.0, Smart Data Platform Cloud/Server (ECL 2.0), IPV (IaaS Powered by VMware), NTT Data OpenCanvas; Oracle Cloud Compute Instances, Oracle Kubernetes Engine, Oracle Cloud VMware Solution (OCVS); Tencent Cloud Server Instance. Unlisted: email talk2sam@us.ibm.com with BYOSL in subject. IBM: “The Licensing Footnotes below apply only where specifically noted within the Cloud provider sections above. They do not apply universally to all offerings.” Note 1 (where IBM footnotes it): “In all instances: 1 vCPU = 1 Core = 1 VPC = 70 PVUs. For containers with Hyperthreading enabled: 2 vCPUs = 1 Core = 1 VPC = 70 PVUs (See Container Licensing page for more information).” Note 1 does not apply universally. Note 3 (Oracle Cloud Compute): “An Oracle Compute Unit (OCPU) corresponds to two hardware execution threads, known as vCPUs. PVU licensing requires 1 OCPU = 2 vCPU = 140 PVU.” Note 5: bare metal / physical server follow sub-capacity and container policies (PVU tables, not the 70 flat rate, when IBM so footnotes). Note 9 (AWS RDS for Db2): 1 VPC = 1 physical core = 2 vCPUs when the instance type publishes HT=2; only named Db2 editions; AWS License Manager. Managed service providers / outsourcing: BYOSL “DOES NOT apply” unless separately arranged. Change log March 2024.
- Applies to
- IBM software licensed to you (directly or through an authorized IBM reseller) deployed on an Eligible Public Cloud named in IBM’s EPC table. Does not apply to IBM z/OS software, software sublicensed by a third party, or IBM Business Partner hosted solutions.