There has been some noise recently about how to license Oracle in VMware environments. I'd like to put this into context with real examples of why I think Oracle on VMare is a high risk strategy.
1st of all lets be clear about this: VMware is a fabulous platform, letting customers drive scale and consolidation into their fragmented data-centres.
However as I have written before, most software vendors have not really bent to the sway of what their licensing policies mean in virtual environments. Basically Virtualization does not fit into their perceived model of licensing. Most customers want flexible agreements that lets them chose what platforms they can deploy on. However the top 5 Vendors policies on Virtualization hinders customers deriving the cost reductions in infrastructure by increasing the licensing costs in those environments.
So what is the Oracle cost of deploying on a VMware platform, well that's something you need to get Oracle to answer, but our experience with customers is clear, you need to license any processor that Oracle has access to. So in a a four server ESX farm with 4 CPU's and 4 Cores each: if you deploy Oracle on an Virtual operating system, you potentially will need to license all 64 cores. Ouch... this is due to Oracle's "hard-partitioning" rules.
The only way to avoid any costs in this is to create a dedicated Oracle VMware environment. By this I mean all the Virtual Operating systems need to be running Oracle, to gain a benefit in terms of Licensing and Scale. However again another word of caution, most VM farms have an in-built redundancy, ie additional servers that can be switched on in the case of failover. These too will need to be licensed if they are used for more than 10 separate occasions of no longer than a day. So in effect if there is any failover testing strategy in place then these will also need to be licensed.
One suggested solution is to negotiate with Oracle, and yes this does have some appeal, the reality is that you need to be ready to spend some money to get this benefit.
Another suggested solution is to find out where on your vmware platform you have installed Oracle, this makes sense, but only tells you that the horse has already bolted.
The best solution is to design your Oracle infrastructure based on the business requirement. If you need an Oracle Database then my advice is don't put it on a VMware environment, unless you are going to consolidate all of your Oracle databases into a dedicated ESX cluster. Otherwise you will leave your business open to potentially catastrophic Oracle Licensing costs.
