Re: Oracle on Virtual Machines

  • From: Tony van Lingen <tony_vanlingen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: dofreeman@xxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Thu, 11 Jun 2009 12:35:14 +1000

Mmmm, that's interesting. We had a discussion here last week about this very topic. It appears that (at least here in Oz) one would have to licence every core for every installed virtual machine (with Oracle on it), so if you would install 2 VMs on a 4-core machine, you'd have to licence 16 cores..


Has anyone a definitive answer?

Cheers,
Tony

Freeman, Donald wrote:
Yes, my understanding is that you would have to buy 8 CPU's worth of licenses 
for the 4 quad cores and you could create however many VM's the host could 
handle. I am not very familiar with Oracle VM to speak to it's features.  We 
(Commonwealth of PA) plunged an bought an Enterprise license for VMWare so 
that's all we have. I don't know if Oracle has an equivalent to Vmotion but if 
you've only got one VM host what are you going to use it for?  You don't start 
getting the full benefit of a VM until you have a cluster and can failover to 
another physical machine.

You haven't escaped any of the organizational problems that you would normally 
experience mixing production and development tiers. We have a production VM 
cluster/SAN and a development VM cluster/SAN.  Just from an administrative 
point of view in the event of a failure it's not good practice to cripple both 
your developers and users with one issue.

Donald Freeman
Database Administrator II
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania
Department of Health
Bureau of Information Technology
2150 Herr Street
Harrisburg, PA 17103
dofreeman@xxxxxxxxxxx
-----Original Message-----
From: Subbiah, Nagarajan [mailto:Nagarajan.Subbiah@xxxxxxxx] Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2009 10:15 AM
To: Freeman, Donald; Oracle-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: Oracle on Virtual Machines

Hi Donald, Thanks. If we have the 4 Quad Core VM Host on Intel x86 platform, 
once you purchase the 8 CPU license using Oracle Licensing Metric multiplier 
(0.5/core for Intel) then we can have any number of VM with the any number 
virtual CPUs. OR for every VM's virtual CPU, you need to buy the license for.

Oracle VM is similar to VMWare? Does it have all the features of VMWare 
(especially Vmotion)?

Though the SQL server is out of the scope for discussion, Any cons you have 
found of using SQL Server VMs combining both development,test and production in 
a single physical server assuming enough hardware resources are in place. We 
are looking at the options for SQL Server as well to consolidate 10s of SQL 
Servers.

Raja.

-----Original Message-----
From: Freeman, Donald [mailto:dofreeman@xxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2009 8:58 AM
To: Subbiah, Nagarajan; Oracle-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: Oracle on Virtual Machines

There should be a long discussion on Oracle on VM in the May archives.
Oracle discourages the use of VMWare through licensing restrictions which it 
does not apply to itself if using Oracle VM.  You have to buy a license for 
every CPU on the VM host whether or not you are using it. I think the Oracle VM 
uses a config file to set the number of CPU's that Oracle uses.  We don't have 
any production Oracle VM's but have some
development on VM clusters.   We have a lot of production SQL Server
VM's.

Donald Freeman
Database Administrator II
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania
Department of Health
Bureau of Information Technology
2150 Herr Street
Harrisburg, PA 17103
dofreeman@xxxxxxxxxxx
-----Original Message-----
From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Subbiah, Nagarajan
Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2009 7:20 AM
To: Oracle-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Oracle on Virtual Machines

Hi List,

Does Oracle support running the Oracle databases on VMs using SAN?
Oracle also has something called Oracle VM. How does it different from Vmware solutions?. Also, Looking to move the hardware from HP PA RISC architecture to x86 using Linux. What is the equivalent of 4 Dual Core PA8900 processeors compared to the HP Machines especially DL-G Series.
Any one has any experience of running production and development on same VM 
host; Assuming enough hardware resources in place any pros/cons of sharing the 
prod and dev on the same VM host?

Thanks in Advance.
Raja.

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