Franck, I appreciate your insights. We use partitioning, therefore SE isn't
an option. The software is on a perpetual license, not a term license but the
software was all from one purchase order so I think we're stuck with Oracle
recalculating the maintenance costs based on the remaining cores. We are only
going to combine the DEV and TEST environments, going from 4 environments to 3.
I like what you and Tim Gorman suggest but I'm not sure how long new hardware
will take to get thru our procurement process. I'm also thinking that once we
inform Oracle of the core count reduction, we will immediately trigger an audit.
thanks,
- Jack
On Tuesday, October 1, 2019, 2:08:11 AM EDT, Franck Pachot
<franck@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Jack,Few ideas here.
So, for the moment you have one contract with 48 EE processors or that is on
multiple contracts because you bought them at a different time? That's
important because you may be able to stop one contract and keep another. But if
it is all in the same contract, then you have to re-buy the needed licenses if
you want to reduce. And have a smaller discount then.The second point if you
have to re-buy is whether you need EE or can go to SE where you count the
sockets and you have one socket per server, right? That can be a huge cost
saving. Of course you will not have the same protection as Data Guard. But
there are solutions like Dbvisit standby which are ok if business is ok for a
RPO of 10-15 minutes in case of failover.Oracle VM is a good solution to limit
the licenses on servers with too many cores. For sure it is something new to
learn and setup, but you should not see it as "another VM stack" if you use it
only for CPU pinning. You will not do HA, vMotion... with itIf you accept to
stop test and dev in case of failover, then you may run on 2 servers only: PROD
on one site and DR+DEV+TEST on the other.Franck.
On Tue, Oct 1, 2019 at 1:19 AM jh3dt68@xxxxxxxxx <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Hello all,
Where I work we have Oracle EE running on 4 physical Dell servers, all running
Oracle 12.2 and RHEL 7. The environments are PROD, DR, TEST and DEV. At present
all of the servers have 4 sockets with 12 cores per socket, for a total of 96
CPU cores of Oracle EE . Unfortunately, due to budget cuts, management is
asking us to reduce our annual Oracle maintenance costs, either that or we have
to lay off a couple of developers, there are 15 people total in our shop. Our
first thought was to combine DEV and TEST as both of those environments are not
fully utilized. That would reduce our core count by 1/4. But digging into the
contracts and the world of Oracle licensing (ugh), it looks like Oracle could
re-calculate the maintenance costs based on the current list price of annual
support, not on the discount price we received when buying Oracle 4 years ago.
That means we wouldn't pay more but maintenance costs might not be any less.
The other idea we had, was to convert the CPU licenses to Named User Plus
licenses for DEV/TEST. There are only 15 people who ever use the DEV/TEST
environments and we would leave PROD/DR alone for now. I understand there are
processor minimums which must be accounted for, but if we combine the DEV/TEST
and switched to NUPs I'm hoping it would result in some cost reduction, even if
Oracle tries to claw back some of the savings.
Any insights or suggestions are greatly appreciated,
- Jack H.
