Fighting the Oracle Licensing FUD

How much insight does your business have regarding the Oracle workloads running on your VMware deployments? This is a question that many data center managers often ask themselves, but seldom answer with any degree of accuracy.

As a developer of a range of plugins that help our customers better manage their OEM deployments, we understand that licensing issues faced by Oracle users continue to grow in complexity.

The solutions for Oracle virtual licensing must be clearly understood and defined, and then applied to your virtualized VMware environments. The comparison of NUP (Named User Plus) and processor-core licensing is now almost moot, as data centers move to multi-core processors as standard practice.

It is vital to understand how Oracle calculates CPU core licenses (seehttp://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/contracts/processor-core-factor-table…) and how this impacts the actual data centers on which the Oracle workloads run.

The key to Oracle virtual licensing is to grasp how your virtualized server environment could change, and on which processors your Oracle workloads are running. An existing licensing and maintenance agreement can easily become invalidated if, for instance, vMotion moves an Oracle workload to unlicensed virtual machines (VMs). Of course, users having a ULA (Unlimited License Agreement) with Oracle need not be concerned with these issues, but if your company is trying to integrate its data centers and pool VMs together, then we recommend keeping a close eye on your available licensed processors.

The Blue Medora Oracle Enterprise Manager Plugin for Oracle on VMware Licensing provides fully integrated, continuous monitoring Oracle licensed virtual machines on VMware-based virtualization environments.

To learn more, check out the plugin product page or signup for the beta today.