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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
Please note that the posts regarding Oracle licensing have been pulled offline following a request by my former employer.
The reason for making a post about licensing is the possible pitfall that could exist in your software vendor’s licensing terms.
While VMWare itself doesn’t make a big deal out of multiple core processors we nearly fell into the trap of Oracle’s dual core and virtualization standpoint. For us, having about half the servers on Microsoft Windows 2000 or 2003 we will have to keep an accurate licensing count but for the sake of the example I’ll just stick with Oracle.
Oracle’s general licensing terms are described in the Oracle Software Investment Guide (SIG) which is currently located at: http://www.oracle.com/corporate/pricing/sig.html. This is a 56 page document outlining everything there is to know about the different Oracle products.
To make life easier….. Oracle uses different metrics and licensing criteria for virtually each product. We use both Oracle 9i Enterprise database software and Oracle 10g Application Server software (which is version 9 release 4 to make it simple). In our situation there were two important criteria in determining the licensing:
1. Processor Metric
Because of the size of the company we use perpetual per processor licensing. Because we are currently using single core servers but are switching to dual-core Opteron servers it is important to keep track of Oracle’s definition of the Processor Metric. The SIG describes this as follows: “…………..For the purposes of counting the number of processors which require licensing for AMD and Intel multicore chips, “n” cores shall be determined by multiplying the total number of cores by a core processor licensing factor of .50“.
2. Partitioning Servers
Oracle doesn’t mention virtualization as a criterium in the SIG document. The wider definition used there is “Partitioning”. The SIG gives the following definition for partitioning in relation to Oracle licensing:
“Oracle recognizes that customers may elect to partition servers for various reasons. These might include achieving lowered costs and simplified management by running multiple operating systems, such as Windows NT and UNIX, on the same server, or improving the workload balancing and distribution by managing processor allocations within applications and among users on the server. While there are two broad categories of partitioning – software partitioning and hardware partitioning – for licensing purposes, Oracle only recognizes hardware partitioning as a mean to install and license Oracle on fewer than the total number of processors in the box.”
In short this means that for our DL585’s the Processor Metric is:
8 cores * 0.50 = 4
So if you are thinking (like we were) about ditching a two way Oracle server for a single vCPU Virtual Machine on a 4-way server which you then give extra resources to achieve the same performance and use that to save on Oracle licensing then you will see that’s not possible given Oracle’s current licensing position with regards to software partition / virtualization.
In the preparation for the project I am fortunate that I only have to check this for a limited amount of apps but keep this in mind if you have this form of licensing for other applications.
Documenting a virtualization project 