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 it
If 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.
