Re: vmware & Oracle

If there is any confusion about vmware and other soft partitioning schemes, the 
licensing doc covers it pretty well I thought.   

http://www.oracle.com/corporate/pricing/partitioning.pdf

Soft Partitioning:

Soft partitioning segments the operating system using OS resource managers. The 
operating system limits the number of CPUs where an Oracle database is running 
by creating areas where CPU resources are allocated to applications within the 
same operating system. The database administrator can set the number of CPUs to 
the number of licensed CPUs. This is a flexible way of managing data processing 
resources since the CPU capacity can be changed fairly easily, as additional 
resource is needed.

Examples of such partitioning type include: and Solaris 9 Resource Containers, 
AIX Workload Manager, HP Process Resource Manager, Affinity Management, VMware, 
etc. This is not a comprehensive list of all the different types of 
technologies or resource allocation devices/programs that would fall into the 
category of Soft partitioning. For technologies not listed, please consult 
pricinginquiry@xxxxxxxxxx

As a result, soft partitioning is not permitted as a means to determine or 
limit the number of software licenses required for any given server.

-------

If you need to stand up 15 dev environments that need to be logically separate 
and none of them use any volume resources, and a 4 cpu server with 15 vms can 
handle that, you'll save some hardware and oracle licensing costs, IF the 
alternative was to buy 15 2-cpu machines for that logical separation.

That seems to be the sweet spot for vmware and oracle to me.  There are surely 
other use cases I am overlooking, but better server utilization of otherwise 
unutilized hardware seems to be a key motivator.

Mark Brinsmead <pythianbrinsmead@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: Let's not forget potential 
licensing issues...

Where Oracle Corp is concerned, VMware is a "soft partitioning" technology (or 
was the last time I checked, about 3 years ago).  This means that you need to 
Licence your Oracle software for the  entire machine, not just for the VMs in 
which you run Oracle.

This can be a bit painful for sites who plan to take a 16-way i86 box, run HTTP 
servers on VMs consuming 14 CPUs, and run Oracle on the "remaining" 2 CPUs.  
You have to licence Oracle EE for all 16 CPUs ($640,000), versus potentially 
licensing Oracle SE-1 for a 2-way physical server ($10,000; $5,000 if it uses 
multi-core processors). 

Sites planning to run Oracle in all VMs will be less affected, except for being 
compelled to use EE where SE (SE-1) may have otherwise been permitted.

This information might  be out of date.  I encourage people to double check.  
Preferrable with at least 3 independent sources within Oracle -- I have 
historically found it to be extremely difficult to get correct answers to 
questions like this. 



On 7/19/07, Peter McLarty <p.mclarty@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: There is now bug fixes 
for time issues with vmware, clocks running away with themselves.

...

My 0.02c

Peter

-----Original Message-----
From: QuijadaReina, Julio C [mailto: QuijadJC@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Friday, 20 July 2007 10:50 AM
To: Sean.oneill@xxxxxxxxxx; List, Oracle-l Freelists
Subject: RE: vmware & Oracle

Sean,
 
I used to have a Linux VM as a node on development RAC enviroment. On a regular 
basis - about twice a week - the node was evicted, fenced which would panic the 
kernel and cause a reboot. I did not dig to deep on the cause - I took the VM 
out of the cluster. But as far as I remember the reason was that the guest OS 
(RedHat 4) would continually miss the VM host's clock ticks. That really messed 
up the time on the guest - making it lag behind up to 3 hours every week. I did 
not have this problem with the other 2 physical nodes in the cluster. 

Julio
________________________________

From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx on behalf of O'Neill, S. (Sean)
Sent: Thu 7/19/2007 9:18 AM
To: List, Oracle-l Freelists 
Subject: vmware & Oracle



Hi Folks,

Has anyone had much experience (good or bad) with running their Oracle DB's on 
the "vmware" product from VMware Inc.  Speaking to local re-sellers there 
appears to be a division of opinon as to whether or not there are performance 
hits when doing so.  We've a mixed bag of Oracle versions ( 8.1.7 to 10.1.0.4), 
underpinning various applications on our site all running on Windows Server 
2000 or 2003.  Any feedback, pointers, or links to useful papers would be 
appreciated, though I'm really interested in "real life" experiences with the 
product. 

Regards,
Se�n O'Neill,


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-- 
Cheers,
-- Mark Brinsmead
   Senior DBA,
   The Pythian Group
   http://www.pythian.com/blogs 

       
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