----SNARK ENGAGED
One of my absolute favorite things in my daily job is PVU's. I just loving being the bad news bear to a customer that was sold the wrong thing.
---SNARK DISENGAGED

I get asked this a lot:

How do I know how many PVU's I need for Domino?

For this post I am presuming you are running a physical Domino server (aka 'full capacity licensing'). Virtual will be covered in a later post. This also presumes Intel architecture.

If you know the steps it is pretty straightforward:

1) Find out the CPU count, model and cores.
2) Use the PVU calculator to give you a heart attack
3) Pay IBM tons of money because you are so far out of compliance you can see Uranus from where you are

Simple eh?

OK, a bit more detail.....

1) On the server in question where Domino is running (I'm presuming Windows, if you are a Linux doobie surely you know what make and model of CPU you are running) open the 'System' applet from the 'Control Panel':



Take a note of the CPU model number (in this case an Intel Xeon X5450).

2) Using Google (or Newegg which I prefer) go find out how many cores there are in this model of CPUs. Here is the above CPU from Newegg:



As you can see it is quad-core.

Next find out how many CPUs are installed on the system by rebooting and going into BIOS or asking you hardware guy. I have two CPUs in my example server. So that is eight cores in total.

Another alternative is to use CPUID if you are able to install software on the server.

On a side topic, some may suggest looking at device manager, but hyperthreading can cause that number to double.

2) With the model (X5450) and the core count (eight) I will now either call STS or go to the dreaded PVU calculator provided by IBM. The actual table illustrated below is available here and should be checked periodically for new additions.

With my model number in hand (5450), I match that to the "Processor  Model Number" shown in red. I then record the "PVUs per Core" result from the same row, shown in blue (in this case 50).


With the number of cores (8) and the PUVs per core (50) I now do some math. Basically I multiply one with the other:

8 x 50 = 400

The total PUVs required to run Domino on this server is 400 PVUs. You only have 100 right? ;)

3) There are ways around this rather huge price. One is to virtualize the server, the other to change your licenses to something more suitable to your size of business. Again STS can help with that.

Note
There are certain products and entitlements that don't require PVUs but that is probably another post. If you are PVU licensed then you also require Domino licenses for and Traveler and BES servers in your domain.

Also, any change or upgrade to the actual server may require more licenses. For example when we upgrade the example server to Intel Xeon 56xx CPU (aka Westmere) then the PVU calculation changes too. It goes up to 70 PVUs per core. Similarity going from a dual core to a quad or six core CPU changes the total.