Re: Oracle Licensing on VMware

From: Jeremy Schneider <jeremy.schneider_at_ardentperf.com>
Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2013 10:49:49 -0500
Message-ID: <CA+fnDAZKntzADQPxC4W5VQih+oro4gq+gDW_d2tUO_shYtj3Hw_at_mail.gmail.com>



On Tue, Oct 15, 2013 at 1:58 AM, D'Hooge Freek <Freek.DHooge_at_uptime.be>wrote:
> * you need to license all physical machines in the vcenter cluster (DRS
> rules are not a valid way to limit the number of physical servers to be
> licensed, regardless vmware states about this)
>
> The reasoning for the second is that, according to the processor
> definition, you install the Oracle software on all physical servers in
> the same vcenter cluster (yes, that is what they told me)
>

IMHO, that's clearly incorrect from a technical perspective. Oracle's software investment guide does discuss how having the binaries installed on a standby server means the server must be licensed (compare illustration 4 with illustration 6). But a VMware cluster is illustration 4 and not illustration 6. It functions like HACMP, HP Service Guard or Veritas which are all explicitly mentioned in this category and which don't require licensing the failover server if you meet the stated conditions. Now these requirements for getting out of license costs are very strict: in addition to the 10-day limit, you also are allowed to only have one "standby" node - if the cluster has more than two nodes then all but one must be licensed.  Honestly I suspect that in 99% of cases, customers do need to license the entire VMware cluster because their cluster doesn't meet the definition of a failover cluster - so I'm not surprised this would be the usual answer from LMS. Definitely need to read carefully and of course discuss with Oracle.

-Jeremy

--
http://about.me/jeremy_schneider


--
http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l
Received on Tue Oct 15 2013 - 17:49:49 CEST

Original text of this message