Re: Virtualization

On Sun, 05 Jan 2014 22:38:25 +0000, Drazen Kacar wrote:

> Are you sure about this? I'm running Postgres in a cloudy environment
> and haven't looked at Oracle pricing for that at all, but while I was
> looking for my IaaS provider all candidates were telling me that I
> didn't want to run Oracle in the cloud because the licensing schemes
> were a huge problem.

I wasn't talking about the cloud, I was talking about running Oracle on VMWare. My assumption is that VMWare is running in the local server room. Cloud changes the calculation.

>
> I don't remember the details because I wasn't going to run Oracle,
> anyway.
>
> And now, here you come, the only person I've ever heard saying that
> fault tolerance in VMWare doesn't have additional costs.

It does have an additional cost, much smaller than the Oracle implementation. Oracle instance is an extremely expensive beast and, by the new policy, the user has to pay even for a standby instance VMWare fault tolerance is normally a part of the implementation. Did I mention that VMWare is not a free software?

>
> If it's not a big problem, could you give me an URL for Oracle's pricing
> scheme which says that?

There is a misunderstanding. The phrase "throwaway database" means license hiding, which is something that many people do. As a DBA I was asked to do just that. The virtual machine was simply destroyed when Oracle came checking for the licenses. After that, VMDK files were restored, and the DB came back to life, without developers having lost a beat. Basically, what you do is to extract a logically consistent portion of the production database using Net2000 DataBee or something similar to it and create yourself a small database, used by a single group of developers. When the project is done, the database goes away. Provisioning development databases becomes easy. Something similar can be done with Simpana 10 backup suite, on NetApp filers, provided there is NetApp FlexClone license. Simpana 10 will create an exact copy of your database and throw it away after the retention expiration. You have a development database and yet you don't pay the license. The same trick is performed by Delphix.

-- 
Mladen Gogala
The Oracle Whisperer
http://mgogala.byethost5.com