Another Oracle Licensing Question

From: Freeman, Donald G. CTR <donald.freeman.ctr_at_ablcda.navy.mil>
Date: Mon, 15 Aug 2016 19:06:26 +0000
Message-ID: <85D44D05C4C24C40AFDED6C1FC0E1BDFD9A10308_at_SNSLCVWEXCH02.abl.cda.navy.mil>

I got sucked into another data call for Oracle licensing info. I support a government agency having an Enterprise Licensing agreement that provides "unlimited" use of Oracle product during the licensing period. The license will be renegotiated in 2018 and so we have to figure out how much stuff we are using and where. There is a lot. They didn't give us a method or process to do this. I have a spreadsheet that purports to be what the historic levels of usage were but its missing a lot of stuff. I have three Solaris database servers (prod, Preprod, training) with 32 processors each. I have about 5700 users in Active Directory. Some number are active and some number are inactive. We have a whole suite of applications some of which are web applications and use proxy users and some have usernames. The max number of active users may be in the range of 4k. I proposed to use a figure of 6000 named users but now I'm wondering if that is a bad idea that could cause a major increase in Oracle's profitability. Licensing 3 X 32 processors (probably multi-core if I look into it) is probably pretty darn pricy itself.

The Oracle licensing PDF just talks about connections......clearly inactive Active Directory users aren't going to connect and a user can have multiple connections.... so which is the cheapest approach to this? We are on Enterprise addition and also use Partitioning, Advanced Security, Tuning and Management Packs.

I'm pretty far down the food chain. Somebody way up the food chain is the actual person responsible for licensing for the entire agency. You would think they would give us some guidance on this. But you would be wrong.

I took this from the Oracle licensing PDF

Example: A customer who wants to license the Database Enterprise Edition on a 4-way box will be required to license a minimum of 4 processors * 25 Named User Plus, which is equal to 100 Named User Plus. When licensing the Oracle Database by Named User Plus, all users who are using the Oracle Database, as well as all non-human operated devices that are accessing the Oracle Database must be licensed. The following licensing rules apply:

 If non-human operated devices such as sensors are connecting to the Oracle Database, then all devices need to be licensed.
 If human-operated devices such as bar code scanners are connecting to the Oracle Database, then all humans operating these devices need to be licensed.
 If non-human operated devices and human-operated devices are connecting to the Oracle Database and are mutually exclusive, then all non-human devices and all humans operating devices need to be licensed.

Processor: This metric is used in environments where users cannot be identified and counted. The Internet is a typical environment where it is often difficult to count users. This metric can also be used when the Named User Plus population is very high and it is more cost effective for the customer to license the Database using the Processor metric. The Processor metric is not offered for

Donald Freeman
Systems Dev Spec, Principle
ManTech International

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Received on Mon Aug 15 2016 - 21:06:26 CEST