It would appear that Martin is getting a hard time from the Oracle regarding the Licensing element. Is this just me, or does this seem like Oracle is sticking their head in the sand?
I find it incredibly hard to understand that in the latter part of 2007 Oracle finds it difficult to accept or accommodate the concept of Virtualization.
Oracle licensing: not OK
We have received word on our Oracle licensing problem. Unfortunately the word from Oracle HQ in The States was not good.
They still will not budge on the licensing issue and state that we have to license the entire cluster (24 CPU’s) in stead of just the box that is running the Oracle VM’s (4 CPU’s). The other option that they propose is to make a dedicated, separate cluster from the production cluster with (in our case) two hosts to keep our failover capacity. But that would still mean doubling our Oracle licensing in stead of maintaining our existing fee.
A scenario where we would put the Oracle VM’s in a separate VMware DRS resource pool with only manual failover so we can prove the VM’s all reside on the same box and do not leave the box unless they all failover to another single box (through the Virtual Center logs) has been rejected and Oracle has restated that they do not acknowledge VMware as a valid means of partitioning a server/cluster with regards to licensing.
The third option (and the most likely in our case) is that we will probably go back to physical for our entire Oracle environment. If it was only a support issue we would remain on VM’s and probably only use a physical box to prove an issue to get support for it but with this kind of inflexibility it is hard to justify putting Oracle in a VM unless you already have enough current Oracle CPU licenses to be able to license a dedicated Oracle cluster of VM hosts.
On a sidenote: I never would have guessed that I would commend Microsoft on their positive stance with regards to virtualization but the difference between them and Oracle with regards to licensing their database products can be measured in light years.
Oracle licensing: not OK « Documenting a virtualization project
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