1. The binaries are installed in the guest so for VMotion the licensing
follows the guest as to what physical host they are on. So if you have physical
host running multiple guest supporting Oracle and flip them all together you
are only licensing one physical host. Requires good planning and execution.
2. There is a different concept of you have a fleet of physicals servers
(Cluster) with squish in it, meaning enough resources on the fleet to support
all your database VMs even if you lose one or even two physical servers in that
cluster. Then your Oracle Licensing is already fixed to the physical core count
and it is within your VMotion grouping, so licensing is not in question ever.
3. Yes, you can simply duplicate the data luns and then use Storage
VMotion on Oracle Home when you need it (No RTO hit).
1 and 3 basically means DR cannot be tested without the real production
database guest. 2 give you the opportunity to even duplicate the guest and
bring up separately, so DR testing without production interuption.
It would be nice at some point if Oracle would follow IBM licensing that allows
you to perform certain number of DR tests without licensing costs.
From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf
Of Rich J
Sent: Monday, August 3, 2020 8:59 AM
To: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Oracle database HA on VMWare without using RAC
In discussions with Oracle about a licensing check for our proposed DR solution
years ago, we were emphatically informed that the Oracle software binaries must
be licensed on all servers. When I explained that the DR piece in question was
not the same architecture and that it would be impossible to run AIX binaries
on storage that could only be mounted to x86-64, we were told that it didn't
matter and it must be licensed. We ended up excluding the binaries and making
the software installation part of the DR, which affected RTO targets, of course.
YMMV
Rich
On Mon, Aug 3, 2020 at 10:41 AM Andrew Kerber <andrew.kerber@xxxxxxxxx
<mailto:andrew.kerber@xxxxxxxxx> > wrote:
I set up a usable HA cluster using Oracle standard edition corosync, pacemaker,
and drdb. Note that this was primarily an experiment and I never tried it
under any kind of load. DRBD is a piece of software that duplicates block by
block from source to target. The entire point was to reduce oracle licensing
costs, so the oracle software is dismounted unless it needs to be running.
https://dbakerber.wordpress.com/2019/03/15/oracle-cluster-with-drbd-pacemaker-and-corosync/
