This is what happens when the guys from accounting get bonuses for inventing new revenue streams from thin air. IBM continues to go down a path that punishes customers who want to install on better hardware. This is just a very bad practice. Why on god's green earth should IBM make more money just because Intel built a better processor?

@1, I completely concur. I have always disliked PVU anyway, I prefer per-socket licensing like VMware uses, zero penalty for faster procs.

This is going to be a compliance nightmare.

IBM is behaving like the customer are leasing the HW from IBM.

Consider a customer uppgrading his 2xQuad CPU server to a new 2xHex CPU.

He used to pay for 400 PVU's and now has to pay for 840...

Do we have to warn customers from upgrading their HW?

IBM is sooooo on the wrong path here. I've got plenty of customers already protesting about the whole PVU model. This is going to upset even more.

Yes, you should warn customers when upgrading Intel hardware, and the PVU calculator already has the updated numbers. Remember this is CPU model related so it maybe difficult to assertain what CPU the customer is buying before it is installed.

With the per-socket model, while virtualization and OS vendors are safe, other software vendors are losing out due to virtualisation.

One possible model that I don't see in use is the per-installed-OS model, which could also easily be combined with per-socket.