Re: Virtualization

Mladen Gogala wrote:
> 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 fail to see the difference. If you have local VMWare with 3 CPUs (let's abstract core factors out, if possible) how is that different from using that same VMWare with 3 CPUs when it's not running in the local server room?

> > 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

Only Enterprise Edition instance. Standard edition looks affordable. Licensed per socket, RAC included.

> the new policy, the user has to pay even for a standby instance VMWare
> fault tolerance is normally a part of the implementation.

Sorry, I didn't understand. How are you counting CPUs when VMWare fault tolerance is in effect?

> Did I mention that VMWare is not a free software?

Not that I recall. Do you mean free as in free speech or in free beer? There is free beer VMWare hypervisor limitted to one physical machine and 32 gigs of RAM (or thereabouts, I'm not quite sure about the details).

> > 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.

Yes, but my point was that the free database download from the OTN comes with the license for development. And only development. So why would you have to hide a perfectly legal Oracle instance before the Oracle inquisition?

Last time I had them in the house I didn't hide the development instances and they didn't have any complaints.

In case you wonder, the instance in question was really used for the development only. Although it might have been not used at all by anyone. But it was ready to service the human developers in case they decided to do some development.

:-)

> retention expiration. You have a development database and yet you don't
> pay the license. The same trick is performed by Delphix.

Amazing.

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