Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Oracle Licensing & Support in VMware vSphere Environments

I believe this is one of the most controversial and confusing topic when it comes to licensing of Oracle Applications/Databases on a Virtual Machine running on VMware vSphere platform. 

During discussions with my colleagues and customers, we debated on some excellent points on this topic. I thought it would be worth blogging about this to spread the correct information out to the decision makers who want to realize the full potential of their vSphere farms by Virtualizing Business Critical Apps such as Oracle Databases, E-business suite etc.

Let's look at the options which we have one at a time..

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How Oracle Licenses its databases?

Oracle like most of the Vendors licenses their databases by 3 ways:-

Method A - Per CPU(Core)
Method B - Enterprise Licensing (All you can eat)
Method C - By Named users

Now, the customers who would worry about Virtualizing Oracle on vSphere would would mostly be using Method A, i.e. to license each and every CPU Socket/Core of the ESXi Server on which the Virtual Machine running the Oracle Application would live. There is a processor core factor depending on the type of CPU and can be 0.25, 0.5, 0.75 or 1.0. This means that you would either have to buy 0.25 , 0.5, 0.75 or 1 license for each CPU, and this entirely depends on the CPU Type (Intel, AMD) and the number of cores.

I would recommend reading and understanding more about Oracle Licensing on the following link - http://www.oracle.com/us/products/database/product-editions-066501.html

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Lets do a quick math with an example for ease of understanding.

Situation - I want to run 6 Servers which need 2 CPU with 2 Cores each, hence I need a total of 12 CPU's with 24 Cores. How would I license this in a Physical World and then Virtual World??
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For Physical World - Total Number of Oracle Licenses required = No. of CPU's * 0.5 (0.5 being the CPU Factor) 
                                                                               = 12 *0.5 
                                                                               = 6 Licenses

Hence if you want to run these servers you would have to pay Oracle for 6 licenses.

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For Virtual World - Now, if you want to Virtualize these Servers, lets see what you need to do. To run these 6 servers as Virtual Machines, you can do with a Single ESXi server with 4 CPU and 6 Cores each. Lets see how many licenses you need

Total Number of Oracle Licenses required = No. of CPU's * 0.75 (0.75 being the CPU Factor, increased since the number of cores/CPU increased) 
                                                                 = 4*0.75 
                                                                 = 3 Licenses

Yup, you actually saved 50% of the cost by Virtualizing these servers just on the license. Lets say you want to give High Availability to these Physical Servers ( in The Physical World ). In that case you would have to buy 2 times the licenses, i.e 6 *2 = 12 licenses (You might have to buy additional licenses for clustering solutions / OS etc).

However, if you give the vSphere host another ESXi server for VMware HA then you would have to obtain just 3 more licenses making it a total of 6 licenses, plus the ESXi License per CPU. (VMware HA would be a part of the vSphere License, hence no extra cost).
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Now, you would think that what is the stopping the customers from Virtualizing their Oracle Databases on VMware vSphere when they can actually save this much money?

The answer is a 3 letter word "FUD" - Fear, Uncertainty & Doubt. There are more and enough myths around Virtualizing Oracle on VMware vSphere Platform and we will look into each one of them and demystify them...

Alright, lets get the ball rolling.........
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MYTH  - I have to license for all the ESXi hosts in the cluster where my Virtual Machine running oracle application/database is running. Hence if you have 6 vm's running oracle running on a 10 host ESXi cluster, you would have to license the CPU's on all the 10 Hosts, irrespective of the fact that my VM just lives on the first 2 hosts.

FACT  - It is true that you would have to license each CPU on which your oracle Virtual Machine might live even momentarily. In a vSphere Cluster, the virtual machines are free to move from one host to another using DRS & vMotion, and vCenter logs keep a track of what all hosts the machine was running on. In such a situation you would have to license all the hosts for Oracle and it is not a Myth.

The Myth is that you cannot use features such as DRS Affinity which can restrict all the Oracle virtual machines to run on specific ESXi hosts in a cluster. Hence license only those hosts which are required for all the Oracle Virtual Machines to run. At the end of the day what ORACLE checks is the vCenter Logs and if the logs say that the oracle virtual machines were only running on 2 hosts and those hosts are already licensed you are good to go. Hence we should use the features given by VMware on the vSphere Platform to achieve this and benefit out of Virtualization of oracle databases and application.

If you think that managing this is not your cup of tea and you want a simpler method, use the popular concept of ORACLE Islands. Instead of mixing your oracle virtual machines with other workloads, just go ahead and create a separate cluster of 2, 3 or as many hosts you want to run just Oracle Workloads and license only those hosts. As simple as it gets....

Now lets look at the Second Myth!!!
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MYTH  - Oracle Applications and Databases running on VMware vSphere Virtual Machines are NOT SUPPORTED by oracle support.

FACT - This myth scares the customers the most and hence is used mostly by the Field Sales to ensure that the customer looks at alternative hypervisor choices.This helps them to scare away customers from using VMware vSphere which is the most advance and mature hypervisor if you compare it with any of the Claiming Competitors.

Now lets look at the reality. Oracle has a Support Statement which says that :-

"Oracle has not certified any of its products on VMware virtualized environments" (Quoted from - Oracle official support statement, note 249212.1 on My Oracle Support)

The above statement does not even carry the word "Support",  hence as a customer or a consultant, I would re-visit what the words of the sales guy and get the appropriate information. 

The support statement clearly states that Oracle does support VMware platform but does not certify it. This certification program of Oracle certifies hardware which run Oracle Applications and not hypervisor, hence it is not certified. 

However, it is supported by default and only in case of an unknown issue, you are asked to re-pro the issue on a physical environment. The reason  they ask you to do that is because they cannot do any testing internally as Oracle Engineering is forced to use Oracle VM and cannot deploy vSphere in their labs [which is understandable :-) ]

To take care of such a situation, VMware has taken a great initiative to help its customers to get support on Oracle issues from a specialized set of Oracle Support Engineers working out of VMware GSS. Understand VMware's own Oracle Support policy : Reference VMware's Global Support Services (GSS) support site and statement. Read Support Policy. This support is a part of the normal vSphere SnS and does not cost you extra. Seems, VMware has a point to prove. 

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To top it all VMware runs all its Oracle Applications and Databases on vSphere Platform and guess what, they get support from Oracle whenever needed . I guess this would be a biggest case study for any customer who is considering Virtualizing Oracle on Vmware.

Well, enough of blowing the VMware Trumpet on Oracle support and licensing. Lets listen to what Oracle has to say on this.

I got my hands on an interview which was done at VMworld 2012 where the Oracle spokesperson was Richard Garsthagen, Director for Cloud Business Development, Oracle EMEA. Richard himself demystified the MYTHS around this subject. Lets listen to what he has to say on this.
 
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I would also take this opportunity to share some of the other great resources on this topic which might help you take the right decision for your business. Here are a few links:-




A great Oracle Blog called the Oracle Storage guy - http://oraclestorageguy.typepad.com/oraclestorageguy/

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Do share your comments if you have any and I would be happy to discuss.

- Sunny Dua

3 comments:

  1. First off, thank you for sharing this with us.

    Second: How does the rules apply in a migration scenario, when upgrading the physical servers in the cluster.

    Lets keep it simple, You have them running on 2 ESXi hosts, and now you introduce 2 new, and more powerful hosts, but with the same CPU/Core count.

    You want to move the Oracle VMs to the new hosts. That will show in the vCenter logs. And according to the logs, the Oracle VMs have now been placed on 4 hosts instead of 2 even though you will no longer move them back to the old hosts.

    The old ESXi hosts will maybe be taken down, or they will continue to be in the environment hosting other VMs, and maybe even in the same cluster, but they will no longer be allowed to run the Oracle VMs by DRS affinity rules.

    What does Oracle licensing have to say about this? Is there a MAX number of days they will look back in the logs. The next scenario could be that you wanted to move them back for some reason.

    Regards Brian

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks Brian..

      As Richard (from Oracle) told in his Video, you would have to License all the hosts on which you ever RUN an Oracle (app/DB) Virtual Machine, hence it would be important for an Organization to License all the hosts in a cluster which would ever shell there resources for a Virtual Machine with oracle on it.

      Now coming to the interesting part , how would you handle this situation in a Server Refresh scenario...

      Since you are introducing new & powerful hosts, you would have to involve your friendly sales GUY from Oracle who would tell you the new difference which you need to pay as you have improved the Cores/Processor etc. Once you have paid the cost and upgraded the Licenses, you can then look at an official transfer consent which every software vendor has for there licenses.

      Once you have the groundwork done, you would be able to migrate your oracle based virtual machines to a new cluster and re-use your old cluster for other workloads...

      Hope that helps...

      Delete
  2. To add to this... if your CPU/Core count has not changed, you can directly involve the licensing support teams at Oracle for a transfer Consent.

    ReplyDelete