RE: Licensing Oracle SE One on VMWare cluster

As you have said yourself, Oracle states that VMWare is soft partitioning and that you should look at the physical machine.

Now, if each of your Vsphere servers has 2 sockets, SE One is possible. When you have a 4 node Vsphere cluster and only 1 VMWare guest with Oracle on it, you only need to license 1 physical Vsphere server (in your case 2 SE One licences). When you have 2 VMWare guests with Oracle, you need to license 2 physical Vsphere servers (4 SE One licences). When you have 5 VMWare guests with Oracle, you need to license 4 (all of your nodes) Vsphere servers (8 SE One licenses).

The licensing for VMWare is in fact the same as for OVM, with the exception that with OVM you can do hard partitioning by pinning a virtual guest to 1 or more cpu cores. But this will limit your possiblities for HA and load balancing. Both Vsphere and OVM has also the possibility to create sub clusters, with OVM you can limit the max number of nodes to be licensed, but I'm not sure if this is accepted with Vsphere.

And I also have the right to be wrong. :-)

Kind regards,  

Freek D'Hooge
Uptime
Oracle Database Administrator
email: freek.dhooge_at_uptime.be
tel +32(0)3 451 23 82
http://www.uptime.be
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-----Original Message-----
From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org [mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Marcus Mönnig Sent: woensdag 19 oktober 2011 21:44
To: ORACLE-L
Subject: Re: Licensing Oracle SE One on VMWare cluster

Hi William,

> I am confused.  Why can't you just buy 6 processor licenses of Standard Edition One Oracle and have at it with as many instances as you want on the 3 physical machines with 2
> sockets on each server?

Cost. :-)

Actually we would like to go for Named User Plus licenses, not CPU licenses. That would be cheaper already now and we might want to push in more physical servers into the cluster later and we wouldn't need additional (CPU) licenses with the existing NUP licenses.

From the Software Investment Guide:

"Oracle Standard Edition One may only be licensed on servers that have a maximum capacity of 2 sockets. If licensing by Named User Plus, the minimum is 5 Named User Plus licenses."

Rephrasing my question: Are we allowed to use SE One on a VMWare ESX cluster with 4 physical machines and 2 sockets each?

Cheers,
Marcus

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