RE: Oracle database HA on VMWare without using RAC

1. The binaries are installed in the guest so for VMotion the licensing follows the guest as to what physical host they are on. So if you have physical host running multiple guest supporting Oracle and flip them all together you are only licensing one physical host. Requires good planning and execution.
2. There is a different concept of you have a fleet of physicals servers (Cluster) with squish in it, meaning enough resources on the fleet to support all your database VMs even if you lose one or even two physical servers in that cluster. Then your Oracle Licensing is already fixed to the physical core count and it is within your VMotion grouping, so licensing is not in question ever.
3. Yes, you can simply duplicate the data luns and then use Storage VMotion on Oracle Home when you need it (No RTO hit).

1 and 3 basically means DR cannot be tested without the real production database guest. 2 give you the opportunity to even duplicate the guest and bring up separately, so DR testing without production interuption.  

It would be nice at some point if Oracle would follow IBM licensing that allows you to perform certain number of DR tests without licensing costs.    

From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org <oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org> On Behalf Of Rich J Sent: Monday, August 3, 2020 8:59 AM
To: oracle-l_at_freelists.org
Subject: Re: Oracle database HA on VMWare without using RAC  

In discussions with Oracle about a licensing check for our proposed DR solution years ago, we were emphatically informed that the Oracle software binaries must be licensed on all servers. When I explained that the DR piece in question was not the same architecture and that it would be impossible to run AIX binaries on storage that could only be mounted to x86-64, we were told that it didn't matter and it must be licensed. We ended up excluding the binaries and making the software installation part of the DR, which affected RTO targets, of course.  

YMMV   Rich  

On Mon, Aug 3, 2020 at 10:41 AM Andrew Kerber <andrew.kerber_at_gmail.com <mailto:andrew.kerber_at_gmail.com> > wrote:

I set up a usable HA cluster using Oracle standard edition corosync, pacemaker, and drdb. Note that this was primarily an experiment and I never tried it under any kind of load. DRBD is a piece of software that duplicates block by block from source to target. The entire point was to reduce oracle licensing costs, so the oracle software is dismounted unless it needs to be running.  

https://dbakerber.wordpress.com/2019/03/15/oracle-cluster-with-drbd-pacemaker-and-corosync/  

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