April 6, 2008
Oracle seems to have changed something in their licensing policy because in two recent cases I have heard of companies being able to license Oracle on a per host basis in stead of per cluster.
I have heard this now in two seperate instances with one person mentioning that this had changed in the last months because of Oracle’s own initiatives with virtualization. If anyone has recent info I am very interested if there has been a change in Oracle’s licensing policy.
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Posted by martijnl
March 13, 2008
Via mail from Microsoft’s PR firm the following press release was released today:
“Microsoft Corp. today announced its intended acquisition of Kidaro, a leading provider of desktop virtualization solutions for enterprises. In combining Kidaro’s virtualization technology with its suite of desktop management tools, known as the Microsoft Desktop OptimizationPack for Software Assurance, Microsoft will enable IT professionals to optimize their desktop infrastructure by providing management capabilities for Virtual PCs, streamlining deployments and easing application compatibility issues.”
It was a great coincidence that I had been looking at the Kidaro website and product just this morning. You can find the full release here: http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2008/mar08/03-12ExpandVirtualizationPR.mspx
I have no practical experience with Kidaro but from the website it looks like it’s comparable to VMWare’s ACE product. I also noticed that you can use VMWare Workstation images as well as Virtual PC images to base your deployment on. Seeing as Kidaro will become a Microsoft product now I suspect that support for the VMWare images will be dropped soon.
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Posted by martijnl
February 25, 2008
I just noticed on the Platespin website that they put up a press release to announce the acquisition by Novell. After Dunes getting bought by VMWare and Vizioncore becoming part of Quest this is yet another major consolidation in the virtualization “tooling” space.
The press release can be found here: http://www.platespin.com/corporate/newsdetails.aspx?id=269. There is also an FAQ page available on http://www.platespin.com/novell/.
I am also curious what this means for still independant vendors like Leostream.
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Posted by martijnl
February 12, 2008
Just like IBM for Websphere licensing there are all sorts of issues with licensing Oracle when used in a virtualized environment. Because the advantages of virtualizing Oracle outnumber the disadvantages in my experience so far it is highly recommended to specifically address the licensing consequences and the possible influence that this has on the final design. This prevents any nasty surprises afterwards when you get an Oracle licensing audit.
The current situation is as follows:
How to calculate your licensing needs for Oracle Application Server and Oracle Database Server products is described in the Software Investment Guide (http://www.oracle.com/corporate/pricing/sig.html). Oracle database and application server both fall under the category of “Oracle Technology products”. Technology products have two forms of licensing: Named User Plus and Processor. If you have a larger deployment (> 50 users) than you will almost certainly user processor based licenses which is what I am focusing on in this post.
The software investment guide has the following quote regarding licensing Oracle within a virtualized environment:
“Oracle only recognizes hardware partitioning as a mean to install and license Oracle on fewer than the total number of processors in the box”.
This affects virtualization customers in the following way:
- Oracle categorizes x86 virtualization solutions as “software partitioning”
- If you use a cluster of virtualization hosts the term “box” as mentioned in the quote applies to the entire cluster of hosts
- With VMotion, DRS and HA you need to license all the servers that the virtual machine could end up on (this may or may not include passive HA nodes, I do not know that at this time)
- Oracle does not recognize locking a virtual machine to a host through the virtualization software with the goal to license only that cluster host. This also defeats much of the advantages of virtualizing the Oracle servers anyway.
Depending on the number of servers that have Oracle software you have the option to let them be physical servers or:
- Make a separate cluster for Oracle VM’s. You can add other vM’s ofcourse but you need to ensure Oracle VM’s do not go outside of that dedicated cluster
- Plan failover capacity for both clusters (this could mean more capacity than necessary if you place all the hosts in the same cluster so calculate VMWare licenses and hardware accordingly).
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Posted by martijnl
February 12, 2008
Example 1:
Company X has 20 physical servers with two dual core processors running 15 times Oracle database and 5 times Oracle Application Server (IAS). Their planned host cluster consists of four DL580’s with four quad core CPU’s running a mixed environment. Currently they have licensed 15 x 2 x 2 x 0,5 = 30 CPU’s database and 5 x 2 x 2 x 0,5 = 10 CPU’s Application Server. The processor metric for the new situation will become: 4 x 4 x 4 x 0,5 = 32 CPU’s for database and IAS. This means they have to license two extra CPU’s Oracle database and 22 extra CPU’s IAS. This would mean an extra cost of $80000 for the databases and $660000 for the IAS licenses.
Creating a two-node cluster for Oracle VM’s to get around the licensing issue they calculate they need an extra cluster host for the “other” servers making the total tot 5 hosts. This will cost an extra server + VI license but will have a positive effect on Oracle licensing by reducing the number of processors to: 2 x 4 x 4 x 0,5 = 16 CPU’s database and IAS.
This means they save 14 x $8800 in annual maintenance and support fee for the database vs. an additional investment for 4 CPU’s IAS at $30000 per CPU and $6600 per year in maintenance and support which means they can expect an ROI within roughly two years.
Example 2:
Company Y has five physical servers with two dual core processors running Oracle database software. In Oracle processor metric they need to license 5 x 2 x 2 x 0,5 CPU’s = 10 CPU’s. They want to virtualize these servers to one HP BL480 blade server with two quad core CPU’s. The processor metric for this server is 2 x 4 x 0,5 = 4 CPU’s. However if that one server fails than everything is gone. So they plan a second BL480 in a cluster making the total processor metric 2 x 2 x 4 x 0,5 = 8 CPU’s. This means 2 CPU’s less than they have currently licensed saving $8800 per CPU per year in maintenance and support (before discount).
Compared to the investment needed in extra hardware and VI licenses there would need to be significant other factors like a high valuation of the increased resilience of the environment (because of the added failover capacity) to make this business case work.
Disclaimer: These are theoretical examples based on my experience with Oracle licensing, please discuss your licensing needs with your local Oracle rep.
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Posted by martijnl
January 30, 2008
IBM licensing has had a real makeover about 18 months ago with the introduction of the PVU (Processor Value Unit). All prices are calculated per PVU which makes it easy to calculate your licensing fee once you have figured out the number of PVU’s you have.
In a virtualized environment however this poses the following challenges:
- In a heterogenous environment finding out the number of PVU’s requires you to count them based on the PVU table supplied by IBM: PVU Table. If you use single, dual and quad core CPU’s in your clusters this can become quite a task
- IBM does not recognize resource groups as a means of reducing the number of licenses. The current policy requires you to license the entire cluster that a Websphere virtual machine resides on. The reasoning behind this logic is that because of VMotion/DRS a server can be on any host using any resource so all should be licensed. Depending on the configuration of a failover environment it is possible that you need to license that failover environment as well.
- The above point could force unwanted or unnecessary design alterations as you need to take into account a seperate cluster for Websphere servers where you maybe wouldn’t want to do that. This could have VMWare and Websphere licensing and hardware consequences by increasing the number of necessary licenses and servers to create separate Websphere clusters.
- An example: if you have two dual core physical servers running Websphere and you use quad dual-core CPU hosts than you have a four fold increase in Websphere licenses even if you put them in a dedicated cluster. This logic evens out when you have significantly more Websphere instances but you will still need to take it into account as a design constraint and calculate how many hosts you need in the cluster for Websphere VM’s to ensure sufficient availability of resources for operation and a sufficient amount of resources for host failure.
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Posted by martijnl
January 30, 2008
As I encounter different technologies in virtualized environments it has become clear that one field that does not benefit from virtualization is licensing. Each software vendor is free to determine it’s own licensing terms and a lot of them end up with licensing terms that do not quite match the licensing terms of others.
In the series of posts in the category “Licensing” I will discuss different technologies and vendors and how they approach licensing in virtualized environments as I have encountered them. Feel free to share to your own experiences with the particular vendor or application so I can make separate posts about that.
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Posted by martijnl
