Oracle Licensing: Virtualized in a shared VPS cloud (or: Eat your own dog-food).
Daniel Hesselink
Levelling the skillsets between clients and Oracle at License Consulting & Vertical Lead at IT Asset Alliance (ITAA)
Other than reducing compliance claims, optimizing ULA's and reducing support, we quite often assist clients around the world to determine their virtualization path, be it on VMware, Azure, Amazon AWS or our friends at the House of Brick in way they feel comfortable. With the FUD being so obvious, more and more companies take steps to bluntly overrule whatever Oracle's white-papers throw at them. But for obvious reasons most want to keep their decisions quiet to not awaken the red giant. Many even don't want to take reference calls in the fear of leaks to Oracle. And so, many companies remain indecisive about their virtualization plans.
I've decided that we should consider eating our own dog-food. Accordingly, I went out to purchase some Oracle licenses. After some back and forth - testing with different cloud providers, playing around with configurations and so on - we'll publicly demonstrate just that. We're now installing Oracle program licenses, owned by License Consulting USA LLC, in a shared VPS environment on 2 Core's. We're unaware of any 'shared storage' / LUN Segregation / etcetera. Effectively, our only 'proof' during an audit is that we've paid for 2 Core's, and that - to our best knowledge - we never consumed more than 2 Core's. And that's the end of it. If Oracle wants to audit us, they're very welcome.
The purpose is to make companies feel comfortable about the Definitive Collateral Collection around this subject, in whichever they want to do virtualize Oracle. On Azure, VMWare, AIX On-Demand, and whatever else is out there. To demonstrate our unbiased and independent opinion: We're going live and public on an Open Source Shared VPS platform. Once implemented we'll upgrade to Processor licenses and you can see us doing this 'live' for yourself, 24/7. Once that's done and Oracle starts threatening you, you can always refer to us. If you need references: Come and visit us. Are we the boldest kid in town? No. In fact, there's nothing to be afraid of.
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Author of vSphere Metrics book and VCF Operations Transformation book
8 å¹´Finally. Thanks for standing up for the world.
Consulting Partner at Rapid Circle, founder of the Cloud Architect Alliance
8 å¹´It's a very bold move Daniel, but aren't you asking for some serious spanking? I still have vivid memories of that last session and it wasn't pretty ;-)