Between the time of the audit notification and the time for the discovery, how does IBM account for changes in the environments?
The audit is done at a point in time. If you’re running ILMT, the tool is set up to report a high-water mark for the quarter. IBM and their auditor will see that – remember, you are asked to keep two years of reports on file for IBM’s use.
If you do not run ILMT, the peak usage may be invisible to IBM, BUT why would you license for full capacity? Full capacity is not favorable to anyone running IBM software that has a hardware-based metric in a virtualized environment. That includes hosted environments too.
Without ILMT, the audit results for full capacity will frequently be judged worst-case. If you have a virtualized cluster on a mixed set of hardware, that VM session may be counted on the largest server in the group because at any time, it may have run on that hardware.