Home -> Mailing Lists -> Oracle-L -> Re: Databases on AWS EC2

Re: Databases on AWS EC2

From: Iggy Fernandez <iggy_fernandez_at_hotmail.com>
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2019 00:01:20 +0000
Message-ID: <CY1PR0201MB0778DD66C36879FEB22CD63FEB2E0_at_CY1PR0201MB0778.namprd02.prod.outlook.com> 








re: I understand oracle is not supported outside of their own cloud  solution



That would be true only if your contract states it



re: Any gotchas with regard to second option on DR site?



The gotcha is that an EC2 instance may use portions of a processor while Oracle contracts require licensing of "all processors where the Oracle programs are installed and/or running" not "all portions all processors where the Oracle programs are installed and/or running".



To solve this issue, Oracle has issued a "cloud policy<https://www.oracle.com/assets/cloud-licensing-070579.pdf>" (applicable only to AWS and Azure) which Oracle has been applying in practice even though the note explicitly states that it is "for educational purposes only" and "may not be incorporated into any contract". The bottom line of this cloud policy is that EC2 instances cannot take advantage of the 0.5 core factor that is applicable to Intel processors in on-premises deployments. In other words, your licensing requirements are doubled if you use EC2. The policy refers to AWS and Azure as "authorized environments" which does not mean that other environments are not authorized but only means that the problem is applicable to AWS and Azure only.



There is a workaround. EC2 (but not RDS) has a thing called a "dedicated host"<https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/dedicated-hosts/> which means that you purchase all vCPUs on a physical server and that's where your EC2 instances are always created. In other words, you won't share this physical server with any other AWS customer. My opinion is that the core-factor penalty in the "cloud policy" does not apply to EC2 dedicated hosts as long as you have purchased Oracle Database processor licenses for all cores on that server.



To summarize:



    
  
  •   Only contracts matter, not documentation, policies, etc.
  
  •   The contracts require you to license "all processors where the software is installed and/or running"
  
  •   The contracts do not prohibit you from running in non-Oracle clouds, whether AWS, Azure, GCP, IBM, or Rackspace
  
  •   The contracts do not provide for licensing portions of a processor which is what you might want to do when provisioning an instance in the loud
  
  •   There is a "cloud policy" (applicable only to AWS and Azure) that solves the problem by allowing you to license portions of a processor as long as you don't use the core factor when computing your license requirements
  
  •   My opinion is that EC2 dedicated hosts are not subject to the cloud policy if you license all the processors on the server.






P.S.



    
  
  •   There is also a "server partitioning policy" for virtual machines which might come up in discussions. Once again, all policies are explicitly non-contractual.
  
  •   An earlier version of the "cloud policy" extended the partitioning policy to AWS and Azure i.e. at one time Oracle gave the OK to AWS and Azure deployments and did not require a core-factor penalty. That version of the cloud policy was superseded by versions that require a core-factor penalty.




    





From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org <oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org> on behalf of Sundar Mahadevan <sundarmahadevan82_at_gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, April 10, 2019 9:10 AM


To: ORACLE-L


Subject: Databases on AWS EC2



Hi All,


Good day. We are evaluating the options on setting up a DR database on AWS. We are looking at 2 choices 1) Restore of vm backup from Rubrik followed by rman database backup restore (The last time i restored a db vm, database was in consistent state and open which was surprising to me. That's a different story.) 2) Set up a physical standby DR database. I was researching on this and read about the guest machine dynamically moved on EC2 causing new CPU IDs registered in the license tracking tables which can cause major trouble with regard to licensing. So do we pin it to a specific host machine on EC2? Any information on this is much appreciated. Any gotchas with regard to second option on DR site? I understand oracle is not supported outside of their own cloud solution, nevertheless people do host it on EC2. Thanks for your time and assistance.


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Received on Thu Apr 11 2019 - 02:01:20 CEST












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