Oracle - grrr!

[Terrier_Jimlad]

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

 

[Terrier_Jimlad]

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

 

[Terrier_Jimlad]

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.