The invention proposes a solution for controlling logical guest machines, such as virtual machines or logical partitions, in a system management application (and especially in a licensing application). There is provided an enabler running in a physical host machine implementing the guest machines or in a corresponding console; this enabler gathers information relating to the hardware configuration of the host machine (which information is not available inside the guest machine). The hardware configuration information is then passed to a licensing agent of the guest machine; for example, the desired result may be achieved by means of dedicated variables or registry keys that are accessible without providing any user credentials. The licensing agent directly gathers other information, for example, indicating the software products that are used by the guest machine. The available information is then transmitted by the licensing agent to a runtime server for the correct management of the guest machine.