by Neal Mueller
Many Oracle products, including the database, are licensed by physical processor. This licensing model works well in a physical world, in which customers typically run one application per host and physical processors are easy to track. But this model is not well-adapted to a virtual world. VMware vSphere® enables you to consolidate multiple workloads in the form of virtual machines on a single host. Additionally, VMware enables you to move these virtual machines across hosts with VMware vMotion®, VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) and High Availability (HA). When running products that are licensed by physical processor on vSphere, customers should ensure the following:
- Virtual machines are running on hosts fully licensed for Oracle.
- Virtual machine movement within a cluster is restricted to hosts that are fully licensed for Oracle.
- Virtual machine movements are tracked so that customers are able to demonstrate compliance with Oracle licensing policies.
Many Oracle products are licensed by physical core or socket, and for these products Oracle does not have a virtual CPU-based licensing mechanism. In a vSphere environment, the consequence of Oracle’s licensing policy is that customers must license all physical cores or sockets in the vSphere host (fully licensed host). However, once the host is fully licensed, customers are allowed to run an unlimited number of virtual machines and application instances on that host without additional licenses.
As shown in the below graphic, customers can take advantage of VMware software’s many advanced features, such as Dynamic Resource Scheduler and vSphere HA, to get the highest possible infrastructure utilization and further reduce licensing costs. This this graphic we show consolidation of 16 processors into 4 processors and the resultant licensing savings of 16 licenses to 4 licenses.
Read our technical white paper on Understanding Oracle Certification, Support and Licensing for VMware Environments to learn more.
This blog is part of a series on Virtualizing Your Business Critical Applications with VMware. To learn more, including how VMware customers have successfully virtualized SAP, Oracle, Exchange SQL and more, visit vmware.com/go/virtualizeyourapps.
While you paint a “rosy” picture, the downside for enterprise clients is the cluster size. As we scale to 6, 8, 12, and even 16 node clusters, all hosts therein must be licensed before deployment of Oracle applications. Therefore, unless the enterprise has hundreds of Oracle instances, the cost to license those few VMs skyrockets.
Furthermore, try estimating this cost in private cloud scenario where the socket count can be very high.
The other outlet, we some customers have relunctantly selected, is to partition the physical footprint so that the socket count is reduced to a few hosts.
Neal, an otherwise great post is ruined at the end.
Your graphic/example is extremely misleading. Oracle license per-core not per socket. Assuming legacy work loads are 2P uni-core (16 cores total) and your hosts are 2P quad-core (16 cores total) there is no saving.
That said all the other benefits of virtualisation apply. In most real world examples there is a saving but please don’t go confusing people with incorrect “facts”.
Thanks for reading.
@Opposing View. The use of the term “processor” in the above post is used in-lieu of using the term “core” or “socket” since Oracle licensing uses both terms. The example highlights a particular customer consolidation experience that although highly successful is by no means uncommon. The diagram depicts that customer experience and is borrowed from official Vmware public documentation . Oracle professionals implicitly understand the concept of “your mileage may vary” and the mentioned example and respective diagram accurately reflect a particular consolidation experience but not necessarily every implementation.
@Matt. It’s important to emphasize that if a particular physical node does not have Oracle installed and Oracle has never been run on that node there is no reason to license that node regardless of that node’s inclusion in an ESX/DRS cluster that contains other nodes that Oracle is licensed on. Again, the “Understanding Oracle Certification, Support & Licensing in VMware environments” doc explains these points in detail.
Thanks for white paper. Oracle does support in my experience. In fact, Oracle own Sales Manager actually asked me to forward the above info to our joint account.
BTW, how is licensing if we disable vMotion for the Oracle VM? So it’s just plain old HA, no DRS. Does it mean only need to license 1 host?
@Matt: Oracle Enterprise is licensed per core. Oracle Standard is licensed per socket.
Oracle has inconsistent and confusing licensing rules. That’s Oracle’s fault, not VMware’s.
Neal,
Great document, but it doesn’t talk about environments with SRM.
How VMware sees Oracle licensing in the following SRM scenario:
- Site A: one ESX server with 4 sockets 8 Cores
- Site B: one ESX server with 4 sockets 8 cores
Can I use in both sites Standard Licenses (04 sockets in SiteA and 04 sockets in SiteB) or I have to use Enterprise Licenses (16 procs Oracle EE in SiteA and 16 procs Oracle EE in SiteB) ???