29 Responses

  1. Oracle software onder VMware: betaal niet te veel! | EarlyBert

    […] Bron: Long White Virtual Clouds […]

  2. Wiebo de Wit
    Wiebo de Wit at |

    Thank you so much for your updated on these issues. It is highly appreciated

    Reply
  3. orzdude
    orzdude at |

    Really now, how can anyone still do business with a greedy company that strangles their own customers in such ridiculous ways?

    Reply
  4. Terry Vercoe
    Terry Vercoe at |

    Hi Michael

    Keep up the awesome Blog mate.

    Just in case you are not aware, you can use Portable NotePad++ to do a side-by-side compare to highlight the changes instantly.

    Also do you post you updates to the NZ VMug on Linkedin?

    Terry

    Reply
  5. Paul Bullen
    Paul Bullen at |

    Worth people remembering that this same non-contractual 'rules' applies to OVM 'out of the box' clusters (ignoring the core-binding and CPU whole cores within a single server) as much as VMware clusters.

    Reply
  6. Ronny Frey
    Ronny Frey at |

    Hi, I certainly appreciate this discussion as many of my clients are struggling to understand Oracle's agreement language. Btw OLSA (Oracle License and Services Agreement) was replaced by TOMA (Transactional Oracle Master Agreement) effective January 18th, 2013.

    Looking into section 9. Entire Agreement, the customer agrees to the following:

    9.1 You agree that the Master Agreement and the information which is incorporated into the Master Agreement by written reference (including reference to information contained in a URL or referenced policy), together with the applicable order, are the complete agreement for the Products and/or Service Offerings ordered by You and supersede all prior or contemporaneous agreements or representations, written or oral, regarding such Products and/or Service Offerings.

    As for the referenced Partitioning "policy", found on this link:

    http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/partit

    I agree that it causes unnecessary customer frustration, as the foot note states:

    "This document is for educational purposes only and provides guidelines regarding Oracle's policies in effect as of September 05, 2012. It may not be incorporated into any contract and does not constitute a contract or a commitment to any specific terms. Policies and this document are subject to change without notice.", yet Oracle references their policies in the TOMA.

    Thank you!

    Ronny Frey

    Reply
  7. JW
    JW at |

    Yesterday the partitioning guide has been updated again. Have you spotted any difference?

    Reply
  8. Adventure Time! » Oracle on VMware Lic and Support

    […] http://longwhiteclouds.com/2013/06/04/the-fud-strikes-back-oracle-licensing-on-vmware/ “The OLSA does not say you must license every host where Oracle might possibly at some point in the future be installed and/or run, else you would have to license every host in your datacenter. Do you need to license all hosts connected into every SAN where Oracle is installed and/or run? NO! You must license the hosts were Oracle IS installed and/or run. As soon as a VM comes onto an unlicensed host, or Oracle is installed and/or run on an unlicensed host, then you must license that host, end of story.” Summary: Now then, once you license a CPU, any VM can run that version of Oracle without the need for addition Licenses.. So let’s Simply create a DRS rule that states the oracle VMs HAVE to run on a host, this is easy. So now that is done, run as many Oracle Standard Edition, in as many VMs are you want too! Knowing this will hopefully prevent my client from purchasing another piece of physical hardware, and it will cover them for DR. They will get 4 or 6 licenses, this will cover 2 or 4 cpus at HQ, and 2 at dr, they will be fully covered on Oracle as I will have audit logs saved for vMotion and drs events. If customer decides to do 4 cpu at hq then we have maintenance without shutting down the guest VMs This will allow them to be uber flexible with everything, and save some cash due to reduced hardware and all the other fun things virtualization brings, as well as adhere to their virtualization first policy! […]

  9. Vegard
    Vegard at |

    Thank you for a good writeup Michael. In my department we run about 10 vmware clusters, 4 of which are dedicated to vmhosts running oradb instances. The reason for this is to isolate these clusters from the others in order to secure compliance with the Oracle Licensing scheme. The setup is similar to your method described in your previous post about licensing isolation (License Isolation Method 4# – dedicated oracle clusters”. Today however, we were told by our Oracle Account manager that we could not run these clusters in the same vSphere instance were other non-oracle cluster live. If we do so we were told to pay licenses for all the hosts inside the vSphere instance, which I think is outrageous. The temporary solution for us is to create a new separate vSphere instance, and move the oracle clusters into this one. Are you aware of any recent changes to the OLSA which would make this requirement valid?

    Reply
  10. Glen
    Glen at |

    This is interesting and timely – our situation is pretty well identical to Vegards. We’ve been audited and in the last two days had two conversations with Oracle, one with licensing guy and one with the sales rep. Both can’t give us crystal clear answers about anything it seems and they are saying that to become compliant we need to purchase 1300 NUPS for our 400 users because even though our VM host Oracle is running on is only 14 processors (using oracles core table) they are telling us we need to buy enough NUPS for the entire 48 processors available on the Vcenter as well as the 12 processors on a remote server our oracle backups are copied to (even though there are no Oracle executables on the remote server)

    Basically they are telling us to go back to physical servers or pay for over triple the amount of NUPS, but what they are really doing is making the option of replacing all our Oracle databases with MSSQL a very easy decision.

    Reply
    1. JW
      JW at |

      Based on which contractual obligation they are claiming this?

      This webinar might be a very well spent hour.
      http://www.dbta.com/Webinars/Details.aspx?EventID

      Reply
  11. Glen
    Glen at |

    Thanks JW & Michael – the link didn’t work but I registered for this webinar tomorrow: https://veconnect.us/gk/g/iUSCcMe6Y5c-254?REF_SOU

    Not sure if it’s the same one or not..

    I’m trying to locate our OLSA to read it, but the original NUP purchase was made long ago and they don’t send a new one out with support renewals.

    The convo’s with the Oracle rep’s was quite frustrating – the one with the licensing rep when going over the findings said that any failure to comply would result in back charges retro to the day we got the findings (which was yesterday – as specified in the findings doc), and that the sales rep would contact us and propose solutions. Then the convo with the sales rep today he was extremely vague about solutions saying he had no authority and implied our solution was to pay up & also possibly face back charges for as long as we’ve been running Oracle on VMWare.

    Very puzzling behaviour, treating loyal customers like this – especially when I talked to an Oracle rep (unfortunately just over phone) before we migrated to VM environment and was specifically told we had to make sure all the available processors on THE HOST needed to be counted – no mention of the entire cluster.

    Reply
  12. Glen
    Glen at |

    Thanks Michael – I’ll have a look at that webinar when I get time, as I see it’s available on demand.

    I did manage to get hold of (a copy of) our original OLSA by contacting the Oracle fellow who sends our license renewal notice every year. It’s a scanned copy of the original and I read it from start to end and the only place I found reference to processors at all was where it mentioned that “Oracle database standard edition may only be used on machines which have the ability to run a maximum of four processors or on a cluster of machines supporting up to a maximum of four processors per cluster”

    There’s a similar mention regarding standard edition one as well, but nothing at all about processors, partitioning etc. or VMWare etc.

    I also could not find any mention of how current online documents etc. would supercede the OLSA, unless I missed something. Our OLSA was done in 2005, and I went through some old emails with the renewal notices and found nothing other than the license renewal quotes – no contract addendums etc.

    We’ve got another call next week with the licensing guy and our sales rep – I know from the last two conversations they’re going be using the pressure tactics again, I’m considering bringing up the L(egal) word & suggesting that perhaps our lawyer needs to talk to their legal dept..

    Reply
  13. Glen
    Glen at |

    Thanks Michael – during the last couple of days when I have been poring over articles about this, I believe someone said they contacted Oracle legal dept about this and they never got responses. I believe the assumption was Oracle legal did not want to touch this because if a case ever got to court & they lost it could mean potentially having to pay back a lot of money to people have just paid (when they didn’t really need to) without questioning.

    I’ll definitely follow your suggestion though, and see where it goes from there..

    Reply
  14. Kal
    Kal at |

    Hi Michael,

    Thanks for the great information it was very helpful.

    I just wanted to confirm about VMSphere and licensing the following.

    If there is a VM Sphere cluster and it has 4 hosts each with 2 Intel CPUs and 4 cores but i installed oracle enterprise database on one host in a virtual machine on that host only. Does oracle license on the entire cluster for all the 4 hosts (2*4*0.5*4=16 licenses) or just for the host (2*4*0.5=4 licenses)

    Kindly advise

    have a great day

    Kal

    Reply
    1. @vcdxnz001
      @vcdxnz001 at |

      Hi Kal, I would recommend you read this article again and also http://longwhiteclouds.com/2014/10/04/oracle-fud-…. As it is relevant to your question. The answer is you only have to license the processors where Oracle is installed and/or running. If it's only running on one host, that's all you have to license. But you must make sure it only ever runs on a host where it is licensed and be able to prove that. The easiest way to manage license compliance is to have a dedicated cluster for your Oracle VM's, or a standalone host if you only want to license a single host, however that has no high availability. So realistically the minimum you should license is 2 hosts. If they each had 2 sockets and 4 cores, that would be 8 processor licenses required for the two host cluster, and you can still make use of high availability.

      Reply

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