System and methods for managing software licenses in a variable entitlement computer system

Systems and methods are disclosed in which the software license for server partitions are flexible in that, as between two (or more, if desired) partitions the software licensed resources assigned to one partition can be used by the other partitions, providing a total number of resources do not exceeded the software license limit. In one embodiment, a workload manager monitors workload utilization to be sure that the total number of CPUs working on the application does not exceed the maximum under the software license. Users are notified when the workload's policy is about to be exceeded. In one embodiment, this could be a warning while in another embodiment additional software licenses can be activated, or a limit can be placed on the CPU use.