IBM Cloud Pak licenses often cover multiple products, making it difficult to manage product-specific license consumption. If you want to exempt just one product on a device from consuming a Cloud Pak license, the current tool limitations prevent this.

Currently, exemptions apply at the device level, not the product level, meaning all Cloud Pak products on the device are exempted, not just the one you intended.

This article explains the limitation and provides a workaround to help you better control license usage.

Workaround

A “dummy license” strategy can be used to exempt only one product:

1. Create a dummy license for the exempted product

• Define a separate license that includes only the product you want to exempt from Cloud Pak consumption.

1. Allocate affected devices to the dummy license

• Assign the devices to this dummy license via allocation.
• This prevents the selected product from consuming entitlements under the Cloud Pak license, while allowing other products on the same device to continue consuming normally.

Outcome

By using this workaround:

• Only the selected product is excluded from Cloud Pak license consumption.
• Other Cloud Pak products on the same device continue to consume licenses as expected.