Great article Greg. Can you confirm? Hi, thanks for the very good article. Many Thanks! You are right though that everything you wrote is in compliance with Oracle LMS.
But when you have a look at the VMware white paper you mentioned, the House of Brick Blog Jeff mentioned or other articles discussing this specific topic you will notice that those usually have got one argument in common.
They say that many official LMS statements concerning licensing in virtual environments are lacking contractual backup. And as a customer I only feel obligated to what is in my contract — not to out-of-contract statements even if they come from official representatives. In addition, users can run only one instance of the Oracle Database XE database on each individual computer.
It is a very interesting point. The purpose of this article is not to say whether the Oracle Licensing policy is fair or legal. The aim of this article is to inform or prevent customers about what Oracle will say if there are doing an LMS audit in a VMware environment. The fact is that if customers are running Oracle on VMware they better have to be informed about what I mention in this blog. Personally I prefer to avoid a trial rather than to win a trial.
Two last points: — what documents do you base your assumptions? Thanks for your comments and questions. In this blog I do not make any assumptions regarding VMware licensing. It is not needed to be a jurist or a lawyer to relate rules and facts. If you read my blog carefully, you will see that I do not take position regarding any legal aspect. These rules are based on contractual and non contractual documents educational purposes such as:.
I am aware of all these documents. We are in total agreement on these points, but once these pre-requisites are satisfied, Oracle has no say in how they are satisfied. I guess that even Oracle would not be as bold as to make such claims to its customers…. You are being too hard on the man. The article is very factual and to the point. If you play, then you must pay.
However, the oracle position goes a step further than you let on, in that you need to license every node in the cluster. Do you have ESX nodes globally? However, if you limit where the vm can run within the cluster, ie 1 or 2 nodes via affinity rules, then you are putting yourself in a defensible position. Insist on this.
The article you mentionned is really interesting. The author point out on one of the core of the issue. The processor definition. According to Oracle you can, could or might execute Oracle on any VM of the vCenter Server Instance and have to pay according to the number of cores included in vCenter Server Instance.
Is it correct from a legal point of view? I am in a similar position to Lomar, having just received a report from a recent Oracle audit and with Oracle now demanding I license all hosts in my VMware clusters.
Did you manage to push back or come to some sort of compromise? Hi Greg, great article. Very clear way to explain all the rules. I agree with your analysis and want to state that Oracle has little interest or motivation to support a narrow interpretation. They love scale-out servers with as many more cores with each core less powerful than the previous generation cores as possible as they sell more and more new licenses.
Use VMware then pay the Piper. Want to use bare metal with fewer cores, fine but you will probably have more servers thus more cores and more licenses.
Oracle wins no matter what. The only option for customers to lower at least their perception their Oracle licenses on x86 as I see it is what Oracle has done with their Exadata X5 products where they have introduced hard partitioning concepts to reduce x86 licenses that other x86 vendors cannot take advantage with. With Power8 servers offering price competitive options to x86 the argument that RISC is expensive is no longer the case.
There are still large RISC servers who need mainframe like features. I have worked with Oracle on this topic several times. Oracle has made licensing of virtual environments so confusing that you get different answers from their own internal people when the subject is mentioned.
How exactly did you reach this conclusion? Or is it derived from the absence of this approach from their hard-partitioning white-list? Again, without looking it up. Anton, thanks for the response. I had also seen this statement in their partioning policy document and wondered how on earth one determines, for the purposes of a license audit, whether the core was active or not at time of shipping.
However, the statement you originally wrote, i. Is it? I think there are two camps here- one camp wants to stick to VMWare- and interpret all guidelines, and provisions to make them friendly to VMWare shops. I think you either decide to face Oracle after the audit and debate based on your contract or try avoiding the debate by deploying a separate vCenter.
If you do so, then again, you need to license the whole environment. Did anyone hear the same? Hi everyone, Does anybody have a document educational purposes of Oracle licensing with vCenter that can send to me?
All 5. Further, due to the 5. The vMotion feature can move the Oracle across the 5. My email is [email protected] Thank you very much, best regards! For me the bigger issue is in having dedicated storage just for my Oracle environment. All of my servers map back to that shared storage. My Oracle LMS is informing us, and this article appears to agree, that all servers attached to that shared storage would be part of the calculation.
That is just insane. Overall, from my point of view there is one key issue: There are Oracle installations with standard terms AND with individual terms. You state that the Standard Edition license can be used if each physical host in a cluster does not have more that 4 CPU sockets. So you can have a maximum of 4 physical hosts with 1 socket or 2 physical hosts with 2 sockets. Who is telling the truth? Hi Martin, SE is to be licensed to servers of maximum capacity of 4 processors inclusive of both occupied and unoccupied processor where one processor is equivalent to one socket for single chip module e.
Intel Xeon processor As such, to comply to SE license, you can only have a maximum capacity of 4 sockets on a VM cluster. So, you either setup a VM cluster with 4 one-socket servers or 2 two-socket servers or 1 four-socket server. You can have many VM clusters on a vCenter instance and each individual physical server on the vCenter instance cannot have more than 4 sockets.
Option 1, you might have to consider downgrading your servers from four-socket server to two-socket server and setup 2 two-socket servers on a VM cluster in order to comply to Oracle SE license.
And you need to purchase 4 SE sockets license for this option. Option 2, you have to split your existing VM cluster to have only 1 four-socket server per cluster if you were to keep these servers for Oracle SE. However, you are going to lose HA capability by adopting this option and you have to purchase 12 SE socket license instead of 3 that you mentioned. I would chose option 1 as I only need to purchase 4 SE sockets instead 12 which save me lots of licensing cost.
Furthermore, I want to provide HA capability for database in case of hardware failure. You also need to aware that the max capacity of processors is inclusive of unoccupied socket. In other words, unused socket empty slot is also counted as part of the max capacity. However, you only need to purchase SE license based on occupied socket used. Make sure you are running on single chip module processor e. Third-party clusterware management solutions are not supported. The license restrictions for Standard Edition must be adhered to.
The maximum number of CPUs defined is for the entire cluster; it is not a per node maximum. One suggestion, If I have VMware 5. So please suggest if this is a valid solution considering the Oracle Licensing.
The doubt I have is having Application in different vCenter which is already having too many Hosts, should not be included to count the DB licensing which is in another vCenter with less Host as the application is using this DB. Hope my query is clear. Waiting for your response. Hello Gregory, I have a different scenario.
The VM is located on a removable device. I use these devices as an offline solution. The removable device is connected to a Windows 7 single socket laptop. Here is how they are being used. One drive is connected to the laptop when is it offsite without network connectivity. One drive is with the laptop but not connected. It is with the laptop as a spare in the event the first drive fails.
The 3rd drive is locate on a networked connected desktop in order to re-synch with a master database. My question is do all 3 drives need an Oracle SE proc license? Or would a single license cover the 3 removable devices? Hi Gregg, Good article but to confirm the position on storage; I have two VMWare vSphere v6 farms, which as you know can live migrate between them and across clusters etc.
So how about storage? If each farm has its own SAN with seperate heads and arrays, then does this fall into the same trap that CPU cores do?
That is they are soft partitioned due to live storage vMotion as opposed to Hard partitioned. If this is the case then any current version of VMWare becomes liable unless you use a solution without vCenter. My assumption is that you need to have a dedicated physical storage for your Oracle databases otherwise you will have to license all the servers storing data on your physical storage.
I was told vCenter isolation was not possible with v6. The new vCenter to vCenter vMotion feature was introduced with v6. What about the scenario when 2 vcenter servers are not linked together with sso?
Vsphere 6 is available for a year now — are there any clarifications available? I asked it several times to the Oracle LMS team but never got any clear rules. Although my question is not entirely related to ESX but applies to it as well as far as I am concerned, Standard Edition is per socket. Now if I have a T5 system with two physical cpus I am not really sure how standard licensing applies.
Thanks for your question. When licensing Oracle programs with Standard Edition One, Standard Edition 2 or Standard Edition in the product name, a processor is counted equivalent to a socket; however, in the case of multi-chip modules, each chip in the multi-chip module is counted as one occupied socket.
If you are correct with your statement indicating that Oracle would accept that if a customer had the Oracle EE DB product on a separate vcenter and separate storage that it would limit the licensing to only those servers in that vcenter and using that storage, then why is there no formal document from Oracle stating this?
I know you say that Oracle has reviewed this blog and agreed with it but I doubt that will holdup in a court of law. Good question. Oracle licensing is considered by some customers as one of the most unclear. The biggest issue customers encounter is the lake of official information not the one for educational purpose only regarding licensing policy. This blog is simply the result of my own experience as an LMS qualified auditor.
In addition what is written in this blog could potentially be totally wrong with future VMware versions. The best you can do is making an agreement with Oracle regarding the usage of your licenses on VMware infrastructure when you buy Oracle licenses.
I read carefully your article about licensing for vmware platform, annd everything you wrote is sadly conform with cases I met. According to the LMS licensing rules as soon as you have a shared storage even if you dedicate LUNs to Oracle you need to license all nodes whatever the VMware version you have.
Regarding the licensing rules related to VMware 6. I have to be more precise. The default rule regarding physical shared storage is clear. You have to dedicate a separate physical storage to your vCenter. Exceptions have to be negotiated with Oracle sales and duly written in your contract. The limitation regarding the number of socket in a vSphere architecture is only per node.
Meaning that you can have 2 sockets per physical node with several such nodes in a same vSphere Server Instance. We have a 2 socket server. Each processor having 10 cores. Installed Oracle 11g EE. This server is having HyperThreading enabled. Hence we have total 40 vCores on the server. Hi Manishd, As you pinned the VM to 4 cores, you have to license 4 cores, which is 2 processor licences here. Regards, Franck. I have three physical VMWare host, each host has 2 socket. I use vCenter appliance to manage those hosts.
All hosts are direct connect to SAN via fiber channel. What I would like to know, is if we turned this environment into a 6 node cluster 3 soft partitioned physical hosts each running 2 quad core intel xeon processors.
Would there be additional license fees if we ran 1 application instance on 3 nodes and the other on the remaining 3?? Searching for the part that would explain that I also need to license all hosts outside the VMware cluster in which I run my Oracle VMs and even all connected vCenters.
Go on the offensive. Stick to the contract. Answer: too easy. Remember, let Oracle produce their position first, before you give them any insight to what you are doing. Destroy that position, then fill in the void. Learn from others and build your palisade. The most successful companies are those with a well informed and well thought-out plan, and then follow it through when pressured. The key is execution.
I can tell you how to birdie a golf hole, but when the pressure is on, can you really do it? Or should you have someone with you who has played that hole a thousand times and consistently birdies it? Whether you are thinking about deploying Oracle on VMware, or you have been doing it for years; whether you are being audited by Oracle or you are just worried, you will always benefit from the experience of others who have successfully been down this path before. Obviously, I believe Palisade Compliance is the best choice for you, much like it was the best choice for Mars when we helped defend them in their audit with Oracle.
Ultimately, however, that is your decision. If you do get help, please make sure you get solid information that does not put you at undue risk. Getting help, like being informed and being willing to fight, can be a great thing or it can really put you in a bind if you seek guidance from the wrong group.
Build your palisade with Palisade Compliance! Contact Us Today. Founded in , Palisade Compliance is the leading independent provider of Oracle contract advisory services. Craig is now the premier expert on Oracle licensing, is quoted in dozens of publications, and assists with many high-profile Oracle disputes e.
Mars, Oregon. Earlier in his career, he was an investment banker at The First Boston Corporation. He specializes in B2B software, marketplaces and artificial intelligence software. Louise Mccarthy. Louise also supports as a CXO advisor for a number of innovative tech companies. Louise has lead a number complex organisation creating their strategy for Global Digital IT transformation.
She is highly respected in the technology, digital industry as a passionate, energized and transformational leader who achieves amazing results. She is valued at board level for design of complex technology and digital transformational visions, and strategy. The ability to take complex organisations with the need for transformation and align to business objectives.
A background in finance and commercial giving the ability to see the wider picture and achieved commercial creativity. Louise is also a role model for females in technology. Executive, board director, mother, and entrepreneur. I believe in the power of authenticity and that in life, you simply have to love what you do and do what you love. Having completed my law degree in London, I was drawn to the dynamic world of start-ups. Commercial Management was a field in demand, and I found myself in a series of fast-growth telecoms firms where I learnt by doing.
Travelling the world, negotiating contracts and partnerships, working directly with and for top management. In the early s children entered my world and in I struck out on my own, offering contract and commercial services to start-ups and SMEs.
My company flourished, in part through the strong link I had with the Association. With experience in Open Source, Mission Critical Infrastructure, Cryptocurrencies, Blockchain, and FinTech innovation, Dickens makes the connections between the C-Suite executives, end users, and tech practitioners that are required for companies to drive maximum advantage from their technology deployments. Steven is an alumnus of industry titans such as HPE and IBM and has led multi-hundred million dollar sales teams that operate on the global stage.
Steven Dickens is a Birmingham, UK native, and his speaking engagements take him around the world each year as he shares his insights on the role technology and how it can transform our lives going forward. While there, he played a central leadership role in the development of the modern business model for bringing open source to enterprises. At Palisade, Max is the architect over our delivery process for every Client.
He leads most of our Fortune 50 Client engagements personally, and serves as the lead advisor on major audit and ULA optimization engagements. Anna-Rita has assisted hundreds of customers to achieve large cost savings and her passion is to help organisations take back control of their Oracle relationship.
The use of external access controls does not make it impossible for someone to change the configuration, but it requires several additional steps to be taken to make changes. The required segmentation methods are focused around both vMotion networks and around storage technologies like SAN.
The specific configurations will vary based on the particular business needs, license metrics and Oracle software involved. Technologies like vSAN are not recognized for segmentation purposes as it is still VMware software-controlled.
Some organizations may feel that the VMware product itself is being solely targeted for such requirements, but that is not actually the case. Miro can help you with your Oracle products running with VMware. We can let you know if you are in compliance, help you configure your systems to save on costs, and help negotiate on your behalf with Oracle in the case of an audit.
Contact us using the information below to learn more. If you have an urgent question regarding your software licensing or a software audit, please contact Miro right away. Miro is a leading global provider of software asset management services, specializing in license management, audit advisory, negotiation tactics, support management, and cloud services.
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