Licensing in Virtualized Environments: Oracle under discussion with the DOAG: DOAG e.V.

Created by Mylène Diacquenod
04/14/2015
Lizenzierung

Once again, Oracle product licensing in virtualized environments needs to be clarified: For some time now, the DOAG has criticized how Oracle considers competing virtualization technologies as soft partitioning. Since summer 2014, the valuation of the license requirements within the virtualization software VMware vSphere for versions 5.1 and 5.5 provides additional tension among the ranks of the German-speaking user community. Six months after the information leakage that was troubling for many, we would like to share a report on the progress of negotiations with the Oracle Management.

When Dr. Dietmar Neugebauer (Chairman of the DOAG), Michael Paege (DOAG Board Member and Competence Center Licensing) and Fried Saacke (DOAG Board Member and Manager) resumed the negotiations with Oracle, they pursued several objectives. So far, Oracle and its department License Management Services (LMS) have not documented the information on the extended assessment of the license requirements of Oracle products on vSphere 5.1 and 5.5, nor have they actively informed their clients. Accordingly, and despite the many confirmations within the DOAG network, it was not possible to prove the veracity of the information, for example, by reference to information on the Oracle website.

Confirmation of the licensing regulations

To this end, there was a meeting with the Oracle Management held in March. For Oracle, Ducan Harvey (Business Development Director at Oracle Technology EMEA), Patrick Wilke (Senior LMS Manager at Oracle Germany) and Günther Stürner (Vice President Server Technologies and Sales Consulting at Oracle Germany) sat at the negotiation table.

The Oracle managers once more confirmed the extended evaluation of the licensing requirements under VMware vSphere 5.1 and 5.5 and acknowledged the resulting communication needs. However, they emphasized that Oracle has not changed its licensing conditions, contrary to public perception. Rather, the change is supposed to result from the extended functionality of VMware software in versions 5.1 and 5.5. The version 5.1 of the VMware vSphere was released in fall 2012. As far as the DOAG knows, Oracle LMS responded to the software's advanced functionalities in the summer of 2014.

Increased licensing demand due to the extended VMware functionality

Up to version 5.0, the virtual machines (VMs) could be moved only within one cluster during a runtime. For this reason, the entire cluster needed to be licensed. With version 5.1, VMs could be moved during a given runtime across cluster boundaries within a vCenter. Therefore, for versions 5.1 and 5.5, all servers within the vCenter must be licensed.

So, from Oracle's point of view, everything remains the same: As before, the hardware must be licensed, which could be used theoretically by the software during a given runtime. Using an example, Paege showed the Oracle managers that this can lead to significant post-licensing costs for companies, without them actually benefiting from increased performance.

To avoid the problem, the DOAG also recommends a workaround: The license costs can be kept low by allowing administrators to provide a vCenter for Oracle products and use 1:n vCenters for other products. Here, however, the storages of the respective vCenters must be separated as well.