VMworld TV: Oracle Licensing in Virtual Environments
An interesting video below recorded at VMworld in Barcelona featuring Oracle licensing specialist Daniel Hesselink and IT contracts specialist Judica Krikke.
An introduction from Daniel’s blog states:
“A brief summary on video about the presentation we’ve given at VMworld Barcelona, pointing out the licensing issues in virtualized environments. We hope this will clarify some of the misunderstandings, and enable you to flip the game around and push back to Oracle with more confidence.”
The two main questions answered are:
- How is Standard Edition for virtual environments possible with Oracle and Vsphere?
- When you install Oracle Enterprise Edition on a virtual machine do you have to pay for the sockets that the virtual machine lives on or pay for the entire cluster or is their an alternative?
Two great lines:
- re: Choosing which version to install “Customers are installing Enterprise Edition because they are used to installing Enterprise Edition – but they don’t really need it”
- re: Licensing Oracle in Virtual environmens within the Oracle contract “It’s basically incomprehensible!”
The Oracle ‘whitepaper’ Daniel and Judica refer to can be found here entitled ‘Oracle Partitioning Policy‘. Notice the bold type regarding using soft partitions and the comment in the footer stating it is for information use only and not relevant to your contract.
- See also from March 2012: Video: How to run VMware on Oracle
- Video on Youtube
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- Tags: enterprise edition · hard partitions · licensing · Oracle · Oracle Licensing · oraclefeature · soft partitions · standard edition · VMWare · VMware Licensing · VMworld · Vsphere
About Martin Thompson
Martin is owner and founder of The ITAM Review, an online resource for worldwide ITAM professionals. The ITAM Review is best known for its weekly newsletter of all the latest industry updates, LISA training platform, Excellence Awards and conferences in UK, USA and Australia.
Martin is also the founder of ITAM Forum, a not-for-profit trade body for the ITAM industry created to raise the profile of the profession and bring an organisational certification to market. On a voluntary basis Martin is a contributor to ISO WG21 which develops the ITAM International Standard ISO/IEC 19770.
He is also the author of the book "Practical ITAM - The essential guide for IT Asset Managers", a book that describes how to get started and make a difference in the field of IT Asset Management. In addition, Martin developed the PITAM training course and certification.
Prior to founding the ITAM Review in 2008 Martin worked for Centennial Software (Ivanti), Silicon Graphics, CA Technologies and Computer 2000 (Tech Data).
When not working, Martin likes to Ski, Hike, Motorbike and spend time with his young family.
Connect with Martin on LinkedIn.
Martin is also the founder of ITAM Forum, a not-for-profit trade body for the ITAM industry created to raise the profile of the profession and bring an organisational certification to market. On a voluntary basis Martin is a contributor to ISO WG21 which develops the ITAM International Standard ISO/IEC 19770.
He is also the author of the book "Practical ITAM - The essential guide for IT Asset Managers", a book that describes how to get started and make a difference in the field of IT Asset Management. In addition, Martin developed the PITAM training course and certification.
Prior to founding the ITAM Review in 2008 Martin worked for Centennial Software (Ivanti), Silicon Graphics, CA Technologies and Computer 2000 (Tech Data).
When not working, Martin likes to Ski, Hike, Motorbike and spend time with his young family.
Connect with Martin on LinkedIn.
There is also a great line in Oracle’s
Partitioning Policy document – “Oracle may modify the definitions and conditions
specified in this document from time to time.” This says it all! Oracle
licensing has always been a minefield, but the complexity and challenge of achieving
compliance for enterprises has grown substantially in the virtual environment.
The only way that
enterprises can really “push back” to Oracle is by automating the Oracle
licence and contract management process. Based on the definitions Oracle offers
on soft, hard and Oracle Trusted partition, it isn’t hard to see that keeping
track of these manually will be a futile exercise. Technologies are available
that allow proactive software license optimization.
They automatically discover and inventory Oracle deployments
and then compare that usage with unique contract terms. More
importantly, such technologies enable enterprises to optimise their Oracle
licences to maximise both value from the software and cost savings. This
facilitates continuous compliance and active management of software spend.
Randy Littleson
Flexera Software
Thanks Randy, I was going to quote that statement from the policy document – but it also states that that no part of this document may be reproduced without explicit permission so I left it alone! 🙂