Oracle - grrr!

Terrier_Jimlad

Terrier_Jimlad

Terrier_Jimlad

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Some of you may know, the Oracle and NHS Agreement comes to an end next year, so individual trusts will now have to license their own Oracle instances, and it isn't going to be cheap, especially if it's hosted on VMWare etc.

We have two Oracle servers here but they're managed by a different internal department, both were set-up and configured by a chap who has unfortunately passed away and as per usual, no one in that department is taking ownership or has any Oracle skills.

Now this is where we've been dragged in. We need to assess exactly what Oracle products/instances and versions are installed on those servers and then we can go away to our vendor and get a cost for next June. Our vendor wants to charge us £3k for the privilege of doing it, so i'm going to see if we can do it for free/cheap. Now no one in my department has any Oracle knowledge, I've been on to the server(s) and can't really make our whats what.

Does anyone know of any free/cheap tools that will do the discovery and inventory for us? I've looked at Lime but that doesn't look that cheap. Ideally we would want do ditch the servers as its the only ones that we don't manage but I am worried they dont have the skills to migrate it from Oracle to a cheap solution
 
We did exactly this a few months back for all the same reasons so can point you in the right direction, and you're right, your supplier is taking you for a ride, especially if you only have 2 Oracle servers.

You need to run the scripts I've stuck at the bottom of the post, this will give you all that sort of info. If they're Windows servers then you need to put yourself in the ora_dba local group. I forget the exact switches but you have to start sqlplus and connect as the SYSDBA.
The outputs from the script will give you a rundown of the version, components and number of users.

VM's can get messy to license, as Oracle want you to license every single host it could run on, and all the CPU/Memory whether it can see it or not - They definitely aren't playing nice with other Virtualisation vendors.
However, if it's only a small system (up to 25 users, I think) then you can license it by named user, which will work out a great deal cheaper.


=========================
HERE BE SCRIPTS!

1. SCRIPT 1

View: V$OPTION
Query: select * from v$option where value = 'TRUE‘
Results: returns the options that are installed in the database
Debate: an option may be installed during the configuration process of a database but not in use
________________________________________

2. SCRIPT 2

View: V$VERSION
Query: select * from v$version
Results: returns database edition, release number, OS it runs on, and other components release number
________________________________________

3. SCRIPT 3

Users are managed at database level :
View: DBA_Users
Query: select username, account_status,created from dba_users
Results: returns information about users created in the database
Debate: DBA / developers may administrate user access many other ways (application, directory, etc)
 
Little Crow, that is fantastic, thank you very much indeed. I have managed to get those results and pop them in to an spread sheet which I will send over to our software supplier.

Unfortunately for us, both servers are VMWare, and the indicative costs for Enterprise is around £10k per CPU, but as we have 9 ESX Hosts each with at least 4 CPUs - the cost is way in to 6 figures at the moment.

We'll see what they say ...

Thanks again pal
 
We only have 1 VM running Oracle, but it is a very small system and got around the ludicrous licensing by using 'per user' licensing instead.
If you're systems are small enough you can do the same and save tens of thousands.
 
Indeed, I was told by Oracle that you have to license for HA too, so you need to pay per CPU per any available host where the VM could reside, not just where it currently resides.

I think we'll be discussing with the department whether to move it all to a physical box, or just ditching the Oracle and getting them to find an alternative solution.

All depends on costs given back.
 
With Oracle, firstly you need to look carefully at whether you need Enterprise Edition. EE licensing is very expensive and uses a multiplier for cores. Standard Edition only counts sockets, and if you've a maximum of 4 sockets you can use SE One licences which are around £3.5k per socket.

It can often be cheaper to pick up single socket or dual socket boxes for your Oracle workload. Oracle is nowhere near as CPU intensive as most people think it will be unless you're dealing with serious transaction throughput. Storage and RAM are far more important.

As for licensing HA using VMWare, you do not need to licence every CPU or core in your VM host stack, provided you limit VMotion to specific hosts. If your setup won't allow Oracle to run on that CPU, you don't need to licence it. Just beware Oracle may ask for vSphere reports showing the host a VM has run on to prove this during a compliance audit.

You do however have to licence every socket or core on a host where an Oracle VM is running or could fail over to.
 
Not sure what you mean here - a web site using Oracle as it's backend database? Or the web interfaces for adminstering Oracle products?

Either way, the answer is no, it's not true.
 
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