As all of my readers know, I have been a strong proponent of VMware virtualization of Oracle Database servers for license cost savings purposes. Predictably, Oracle has pushed back on this issue in the past. Well, they have now thrown in the towel.
In an online video, Richard Garsthagen, Director of Cloud Business Development EMEA for Oracle, has stated publicly that VMware host affinity rules (when combined with vMotion logging) work just fine, thank you very much, for purposes of establishing where Oracle software is "installed and/or running" for purposes of the Oracle Software License Agreement (OSLA).
Previously, Oracle has maintained that all servers in a cluster must be licensed if even a single VM on any server in the cluster is running Oracle software. VMware has officially disagreed with this statement in their white paper on Oracle Licensing and Support. But the opposing view by Oracle has been a serious deterrent to adoption of VMware virtualization of Oracle servers. No longer.
I think we can consider this issue closed. Customers can now virtualize Oracle database servers without any concern about Oracle hitting them with unreasonable license cost demands. This is undoubtedly great news, and a great watershed event in this area.
It this published in any of the Oracle (like www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/partitioning-070609.pdf) documents or just in online video ?
Posted by: Radomir | August 30, 2012 at 11:25 PM
Mind the initial video was removed from the Youtube channel of VMworldTV one day after it appeared. Someone was clever enough to make a copy and now it is online again.
wonder who requested to have the video deleted?
read the story here
http://up2v.nl/2012/08/28/its-on-tape-oracle-supports-vmware-drs-host-affinity/
Posted by: Marcel | August 31, 2012 at 04:30 AM
Hmm, I'm not so sure that this issue can be considered closed, given the fact that the original video was removed for whatever reason.
Posted by: Bert | August 31, 2012 at 06:16 AM
Could you please get a confirmation from Oracle legal department, since the Oracle official paper on CPU partitioning has not changed ? (http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/partitioning-070609.pdf)
Posted by: Peter Gram | August 31, 2012 at 03:34 PM
Per Oracle
"Oracle does not recognize either (Vmware/DRS Affinity) as a hard partition and therefore all physical processors / cores within the virtual cluster need to be licensed"
Posted by: Rob Bergin | September 05, 2012 at 10:25 AM