New vSphere 5 Licensing & Oracle on vSphere
Following a Twitter conversation between myself and @aus_effendi, Oracle-on-vSphere guru extraordinaire, I thought it might help to create a short post on the implications of Oracle licensing on vSphere given the new vSphere 5 licensing model.
First, I won’t go into much detail on the new vSphere licensing, and I haven’t made my full opinion of it yet so this definitely isn’t a rant on that. Go here for more info and then come right back!
The basic idea that’s strating to come about, is that it will be a challenge to license dual-socket hosts with greater than 96GB of RAM (assuming Essentials Plus). Taking one of the new blades with 512 GB of RAM for example, we would need 11-CPU licenses for a 2 CPU host!
Oracle licensing, for those who don’t know, is based upon CPU Cores, not sockets. For example, a new blade with dual-12 core CPUs would require 12 CPU licenses of Oracle (there is a .5 scaling factor for x86 hardware). You can then run as many Oracle instances in as many VMs as you want, on that one blade (now up to your vRAM license capacity in vSphere 5).
Now, given that according to the latest price list, a single CPU license of Oracle Enterprise edition is $17,500 (http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/technology-price-list-070617.pdf), the blade in the example above would cost $210,000 to license Oracle alone!
Your mileage may vary in terms of the CPU type and memory configuration you plan to buy in the future, but we all know the trend will be towards larger and larger configurations. It seems this may be one case where paying for the extra hit on vSphere vRAM licenses for vertical scaling will certainly be more favorable than paying for the Oracle licenses required to scale horizontally.
One thing is for certain. In a world where we already have trouble convincing DBAs and CIOs alike that virtualizing Oracle on vSphere is a great approach (see my previous post http://www.timcurless.com/post/5583656499/profiling-oracle-11g-performance-on-vsphere-with), this licensing duality will only make things more complicated!
Let’s hear your thoughts in the comments!
