Disaster recovery and high availability licensing rights.

Three standby states, three different answers

IBM licensing distinguishes recovery environments by how active they are, and the activity level decides whether they consume entitlement. The terms appear in the International Passport Advantage Agreement and the supporting backup provisions, and the distinction is not about intent or labels but about what the software is actually doing on the standby machine.

• Cold standby. The software is installed but not started. The machine sits powered down or idle until a failover. This is the case IBM treats most favorably, and limited backup use can fall under the program terms without separate full licensing.
• Warm standby. The software is installed and running, kept in sync and ready to take over, but not serving production work. Because the program is running, it generally consumes entitlement on the cores it occupies.
• Hot standby. The environment is live and capable of serving load, often part of an active cluster. It is licensed like any other production deployment.

Where companies get caught

The common error is assuming anything labeled DR is free. A node configured for fast failover, with the software running and data replicating, is a warm environment by behavior even if the organization calls it cold. Under an IBM audit, the discovery data tells the real story: a started process, recent activity, and synchronized state all indicate the software was running, and a running instance generally needs entitlement regardless of the name on the rack.

High availability clusters raise the stakes further. In an active and active pair, both nodes serve load and both must be licensed. In an active and passive pair, the passive node's treatment depends on whether the software is running there, which returns to the cold versus warm distinction. The PVU count then follows the usual rule: cores allocated to the software, and on LPAR or Power systems that means allocated cores even when the node is idle.

Defending the recovery tier

The defense is evidence about state, not assertion about purpose. To hold a cold standby position you want to show the software was genuinely not started during the period in question, with configuration and logs that support it. Where a node is warm, the question shifts to whether sub-capacity applies and how many virtual cores the software actually occupies, which is again an ILMT and entitlement reconciliation problem. Either way, an auditor's full-capacity assumption on a recovery environment is contestable when the standby state is documented correctly.