Oracle licensing (AS / DB): other experiences ?

[MartijnLo]

Referring to my blogposts on the matter: and

As this has gone up to VP Level at Oracle US (according to my contact) I would like to know if others have had different experiences or solutions to their Oracle licensing for Virtual Machines.

If someone from VMWare could chime in on the status of the Technology Alliance with Oracle ( ) that would be great as well because as a customer of both we are not seeing a lot of benefits at the moment.

[petedr]

We had all of our licensing set up as Named Users so we never had this issue with what hardware we ran our Oracle database and also its applications on or if it was a VM or not. I agree there are so many benefits of running Oracle as a VM and it with the hard line you are getting from Oracle is is prohibitive which is a shame.

[MartijnLo]

Unfortunately Named User licensing will be even more expensive for us because of the number of users. For Oracle Enterprise Edition databases you don't need a lot of Named Users to make it more expensive than buying CPU's.

[TomHowarth]

Oracles Licensing policy will not change until such a time as there is a viable alternative to them in their market place.

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Kind Regards

Tom,

[petedr]

We were lucky in that our named user count wasn't high enough to make that option cost prohibitive.

[madcult]

According to this thread and this one: http://communities.vmware.com/message/522671#522671 about licensing I still have a question:

We all know that at the moment it is possible to configure a virtual machine with 4 cpus max.. I have read that oracle counts 0.5 points per core for licensing.

So what if you have a HA/DRS Cluster with 8 hosts (each host having 2 dualcore cpus) will it be necessary to license oracle with 16 points ( 8 * 2 cpu * 2 cores * 0.5 points/core) for 32 cores? It could be that an oracle server might run on every cpu, couldn't it? I am wrong?

[petedr]

I am not sure what the official answer is but I know that Oracle has been rigid in its licensing position for virtuals and CPUs so you may be right.

[prime]

Referring to my blogposts on the matter: and

Those links are broken.

[MartijnLo]

This is correct. Due to a request from my employer I have removed those posts as they were interfering with their licensing discussion.

[MartijnLo]

Will only resolve if Oracle changes policy