Re: Oracle on Virtual Machines

  • From: Tony van Lingen <tony_vanlingen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: Paul Drake <bdbafh@xxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Thu, 11 Jun 2009 14:25:42 +1000

Paul,

We were talking about Standard Edition at the time. The licensing policy for physical machines is clear enough, but what our worries centred on is how virtual CPUs are counted. In the case of two VMs, each with access to all physical CPUs, running Oracle (either SE or EE), are we going to have to cough up twice the amount of actual physical cores/sockets or is licencing on the physical hardware only? In other words, do we license virtual CPUs or real ones? Or, as someone suggested, both?

Of course in our organisation we run VMware clusters and vmotion, which compounds the situation even more - but let's leave that aside for the moment.

cheers,
Tony

Paul Drake wrote:
Tony,

What edition of the database server software are you referring to?

Oracle Standard Edition and Standard Edition One of the database
server software are licensed per socket. I haven't heard an official
stance on 6 core, 8 core or 12 core x86_64 processors, but it should
fall in line with their current stance.

If you're referring to Enterprise Edition, its by core with a discount
factor of 0.5 for x86 (and x86_64). So leveraging a high core count
would get expensive in a huge hurry.

If you can run a dual socketed VMWare server with a total of 8-12
cores licensed for Oracle Standard Edition One but you're only running
4 cores for supporting Oracle database servers, you're at a break even
(IMHO). The other cores supporting other virtual machines are gravy.

Paul


On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 10:35 PM, Tony van
Lingen<tony_vanlingen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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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