Re: Oracle on Virtual Machines

We were talking about Standard Edition at the time. The licensing policy for physical machines is clear enough, but what our worries centred on is how virtual CPUs are counted. In the case of two VMs, each with access to all physical CPUs, running Oracle (either SE or EE), are we going to have to cough up twice the amount of actual physical cores/sockets or is licencing on the physical hardware only? In other words, do we license virtual CPUs or real ones? Or, as someone suggested, both?

Of course in our organisation we run VMware clusters and vmotion, which compounds the situation even more - but let's leave that aside for the moment.

cheers,
Tony

Paul Drake wrote:
> Tony,
>
> What edition of the database server software are you referring to?
>
> Oracle Standard Edition and Standard Edition One of the database
> server software are licensed per socket. I haven't heard an official
> stance on 6 core, 8 core or 12 core x86_64 processors, but it should
> fall in line with their current stance.
>
> If you're referring to Enterprise Edition, its by core with a discount
> factor of 0.5 for x86 (and x86_64). So leveraging a high core count
> would get expensive in a huge hurry.
>
> If you can run a dual socketed VMWare server with a total of 8-12
> cores licensed for Oracle Standard Edition One but you're only running
> 4 cores for supporting Oracle database servers, you're at a break even
> (IMHO). The other cores supporting other virtual machines are gravy.
>
> Paul
>
>
> On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 10:35 PM, Tony van
> Lingen<tony_vanlingen_at_technologyonecorp.com> wrote:
>
>> Mmmm, that's interesting. We had a discussion here last week about this very
>> topic. It appears that (at least here in Oz) one would have to licence every
>> core for every installed virtual machine (with Oracle on it), so if you
>> would install 2 VMs on a 4-core machine, you'd have to licence 16 cores..
>>
>> Has anyone a definitive answer?
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Tony
>>
>> Freeman, Donald wrote:
>>
>> Yes, my understanding is that you would have to buy 8 CPU's worth of
>> licenses for the 4 quad cores and you could create however many VM's the
>> host could handle. I am not very familiar with Oracle VM to speak to it's
>> features. We (Commonwealth of PA) plunged an bought an Enterprise license
>> for VMWare so that's all we have. I don't know if Oracle has an equivalent
>> to Vmotion but if you've only got one VM host what are you going to use it
>> for? You don't start getting the full benefit of a VM until you have a
>> cluster and can failover to another physical machine.
>>
>> You haven't escaped any of the organizational problems that you would
>> normally experience mixing production and development tiers. We have a
>> production VM cluster/SAN and a development VM cluster/SAN. Just from an
>> administrative point of view in the event of a failure it's not good
>> practice to cripple both your developers and users with one issue.
>>
>> Donald Freeman
>> Database Administrator II
>> Commonwealth of Pennsylvania
>> Department of Health
>> Bureau of Information Technology
>> 2150 Herr Street
>> Harrisburg, PA 17103
>> dofreeman_at_state.pa.us
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Subbiah, Nagarajan [mailto:Nagarajan.Subbiah_at_aetn.com]
>> Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2009 10:15 AM
>> To: Freeman, Donald; Oracle-L_at_freelists.org
>> Subject: RE: Oracle on Virtual Machines
>>
>> Hi Donald, Thanks. If we have the 4 Quad Core VM Host on Intel x86 platform,
>> once you purchase the 8 CPU license using Oracle Licensing Metric multiplier
>> (0.5/core for Intel) then we can have any number of VM with the any number
>> virtual CPUs. OR for every VM's virtual CPU, you need to buy the license
>> for.
>>
>> Oracle VM is similar to VMWare? Does it have all the features of VMWare
>> (especially Vmotion)?
>>
>> Though the SQL server is out of the scope for discussion, Any cons you have
>> found of using SQL Server VMs combining both development,test and production
>> in a single physical server assuming enough hardware resources are in place.
>> We are looking at the options for SQL Server as well to consolidate 10s of
>> SQL Servers.
>>
>> Raja.
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Freeman, Donald [mailto:dofreeman_at_state.pa.us]
>> Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2009 8:58 AM
>> To: Subbiah, Nagarajan; Oracle-L_at_freelists.org
>> Subject: RE: Oracle on Virtual Machines
>>
>> There should be a long discussion on Oracle on VM in the May archives.
>> Oracle discourages the use of VMWare through licensing restrictions which it
>> does not apply to itself if using Oracle VM. You have to buy a license for
>> every CPU on the VM host whether or not you are using it. I think the Oracle
>> VM uses a config file to set the number of CPU's that Oracle uses. We don't
>> have any production Oracle VM's but have some
>> development on VM clusters. We have a lot of production SQL Server
>> VM's.
>>
>>
>> Donald Freeman
>> Database Administrator II
>> Commonwealth of Pennsylvania
>> Department of Health
>> Bureau of Information Technology
>> 2150 Herr Street
>> Harrisburg, PA 17103
>> dofreeman_at_state.pa.us
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org
>> [mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Subbiah, Nagarajan
>> Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2009 7:20 AM
>> To: Oracle-L_at_freelists.org
>> Subject: Oracle on Virtual Machines
>> Hi List,
>>
>> Does Oracle support running the Oracle databases on VMs using SAN?
>> Oracle also has something called Oracle VM. How does it different from
>> Vmware solutions?.
>>
>> Also, Looking to move the hardware from HP PA RISC architecture to x86
>> using Linux. What is the equivalent of 4 Dual Core PA8900 processeors
>> compared to the HP Machines especially DL-G Series.
>>
>> Any one has any experience of running production and development on same VM
>> host; Assuming enough hardware resources in place any pros/cons of sharing
>> the prod and dev on the same VM host?
>>
>> Thanks in Advance.
>> Raja.
>>
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