Oracle DB Server Licensing on VMware- Soft Partitioning
Oracle Database Server licensing can be complex. In this blog, I’ll discuss a variety of factors that add this complexity, including Oracle’s Soft/Hard Partitioning rules and how they relate to virtual infrastructure.
Partitioning:
Partitioning” occurs when the CPUs on a server are separated into individual sections where each section acts as a separate system
Partitioning helps in the:
- Ability to run multiple operating systems, or multiple versions of an operating system, on the same server
- Ability to improve workload balancing and distribution by managing processor allocations across applications and users on the server
Oracle defines two types of partitioning:
“Unless explicitly stated, Soft Partitioning is not permitted to determine or limit the software licenses required for a given server or a cluster of servers”- Oracle
Please refer to Oracle Partitioning policy here for more details on this subject
In this blog, we will cover ServiceNow SAM Pro support on licensing Oracle DB Server on VMware, which is a soft partitioning technology as defined by Oracle.
Use Case
Figure 1 Use Case for Soft Partitioning
Consider, this use case-> Oracle DB Server is installed only on one virtual machine, and this is moving across the entire Cluster A. As Oracle considers VMware a soft partitioning technology the entire cluster would need to be licensed where the virtual machine can move.
This use case showcases the huge risk that organisations face while deploying Oracle DB on a VMware cluster. ServiceNow SAM Pro can effectively determine the number of Oracle licenses that would be required and serve as a critical alert to the SAM Manager to either deploy Oracle DB on a smaller cluster or redeploy Oracle in another cluster.
Let’s see this in action!
- SAM Manager logs into the new SAM Workspace and opens the card for Oracle
2. SAM Manager can click on Oracle DB Server, and observe the license compliance position for the same. Looking at the License metric results for processor based licensing model, they can observe that the organization is non-compliant and is short of 244 licenses
Figure 2 Oracle License Work Bench
3. Clicking on number “914” under Licenses required, showcase the different devices consuming licenses. Notice that VMware Cluster A is consuming 32 rights as is Unlicensed
Figure 3 Oracle Licenses required by different devices
4. Click on the number “32”, to understand more details. Notice that ServiceNow SAM Pro provides details on the
- License metric used: to understand more details on the per processor licensing model in this case
- CMDB dependency view to understand the underlying architecture
Figure 4 Licensing Model Explanation with CMDB Dependency View
The SAM Manager can click on the dependency view to understand the underlying Infrastructure view of the Cluster A, notice it is same as per the use case above
Figure 5 CMDB Dependency View
The SAM manager can open the Configuration Item-ESX Server to understand its discovered attributes such as processor name, CPU Count, CPU Core Count etc.
Figure 6 Host Configuration Item with Discovered Details
5. To review more details on license consumption, software install, and unlicensed instance, click on the individual tabs
Figure 7 License Consumption Details
Figure 8 Software Install Licensing Details
Notice that although there are 3 Virtual machines, only 1 Oracle DB Server is installed on VM1. However, it is free to move across the cluster and hence it would need to be licensed for all hosts in the cluster.
Herein there are 2 Hosts viz. ESX-A1-8-4 and ESX-A2-8-4 as part of Cluster A.
- ESX-A1-8-4-> is having 8 Processor and 4 cores and having Intel Xeon Processor hence it will consume rights = 8*4*0.5 (Core factor) = 16 rights
- Similarly, ESX-A2-8-4 will also consume 16 rights.
ServiceNow SAM Pro automatically applies the core factor as per Oracle Core Factor table mentioned here
SAM Manager can observe that even with one Oracle DB Server install in a cluster the license implications are very high. This provides insights to the SAM Manager to work with the infrastructure team to limit Oracle DB Server movement in the cluster.
For VMware,
ServiceNow SAM supports additional advanced use cases such as
- Supporting Oracle DB Server based on VMware version: Track and manage licenses for Oracle Database servers that run on VMware vSphere ESXi 5.1 to 5.5 and VMware vCenter Server 6.0 and later. Support for these additional VMware vSphere versions enables you to account for enhanced vMotion capabilities and licensing scenarios when reconciling your Oracle Database server
- Showcase compliance as per the level of aggregation i.e., at the ESX Level, Cluster level or vcenter level
- Support host affinity : These are for cases, where the organization has agreed with Oracle that VMware's host affinity rules can be considered during audit
More details can be referred here
In the next blog series, we will cover Oracle DB Server support on hard partition environment and on the cloud.
