I recently posted on Michael Webster of Nutanix’ blog about Oracle licensing on VMware clusters and wanted to link back to it here as it’s something I’ve been involved with several times now.
With VMware vSphere 5.5 the vMotion boundary is defined by the individual datacenter object in vCenter, which means that you cannot move an individual VM between datacenters without exporting, removing it from the inventory, and reimporting somewhere else. This currently means that even if you deploy Oracle DB on an ESXi cluster having just two nodes that you could be required by Oracle to license all of the other CPU sockets in the datacenter!
This rule is due to Oracle’s stance that they do not support soft partitioning or any kind of host or CPU affinity rules. Providing that a VM could run on a processor socket, through some kind of administrative operation, then that socket should be licensed. This doesn’t seem fair, and VMware even suggest that this can be counteracted by simply defining host affinity rules – but let’s be clear, the final say so has to be down to Oracle’s licensing agreement and not whether VMware thinks it should be acceptable.
So the only current solution is to build Oracle dedicated clusters with separate shared storage and separate vCenter instances consisting only of Oracle DB servers. This means that you are able to define exactly which CPU sockets should be licensed, in effect all those which make up part of one or more ESXi clusters within the vCenter datacenter object.
Now, with vSphere ESXi 6 there was a new feature introduced called long distance vMotion which facilitates being able to migrate a VM between cities, or even continents – even if they are managed by different vCenter instances. An excellent description of the new features can be found here.
This rather complicates the matter, since Oracle will now need to consider how this effects the ‘reach’ of any particular VM instance, which now would appear to only be limited to the scope of your single sign-on domain, rather than how many hosts or clusters are defined within your datacenter. I will be interested to see how this develops and certainly post back here if anything moves us further towards clarity on this subject.
Permalink to Michael’s original article
