Dirty Cache

Another example of Oracle apparently ignoring all business ethics and charging a customer €300,000.- for an environment where common sense leads to a more reasonable license fee of €4,000.-

I always wonder why customers (even very large and powerful ones) accept this behaviour without a fight and pay the fines or avoid it by buying into Oracle’s stack – while they would prefer a technical superior solution from another vendor. I don’t mind competition – it’s healthy for everyone – but I’ve seen too many examples where customers knowingly go for the mediocre solution because they are scared of the bullying by their database vendor if they go for the best one.

But this time it seems one (Dutch!) customer actually does not accept being pushed around and starts a legal battle with Oracle on insane licensing rules.

Copy/paste from the Linkedin article of Licenseconsulting:

“Some time ago we created a review report for a rather new and small Oracle client, who purchased Oracle software licenses in order to run them on a VMware platform. According to the client the (additional) cost of running Oracle on vCenter would be €4000.-. Oracle’s legal counsel confirmed in writing that the cost would be almost €300.000.- using VMware vCenter, and just a fraction of that cost if the client would use OracleVM instead.”

Read the entire post here

A must read if you are concerned with Oracle on VMware license issues.

Last year on march 19, 2015, Database Trends and Applications (DBTA) hosted a webcast covering the licensing part of running Oracle on VMware.

As DBTA archives old webcasts after one year, I asked for permission to re-publish because I think it’s too valuable to have it hidden in the digital eternity (also why I have put it on a separate static blog page instead of a normal blogpost).

Speakers: Don Sullivan of VMware, Dave Welch of House of Brick, Daniel Hesselink of License Consulting, and Dan Young of Indiana University.

Sponsors: VMware, IOUG

The video is about an hour so take your time – but it is a definite MUST READ if you want to learn the truth about Oracle/VMware licensing. In the video it is explained how to value certain licensing documents, how to set up your VMware farm to avoid compliance problems, and most of all, it effectively handles a lot of the Oracle on VMware licensing FUD.

Get a cup of coffee, and view the webcast here: Straight Talk on Oracle on VMware licensing.

Enjoy!

This post first appeared on Dirty Cache by Bart Sjerps. Copyright © 2011 – 2016. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.

Last week I was in London to attend the UK Oracle User Group licensing event. After a number of sessions with excellent material leading to very interesting discussions (one was showing – with permission – some of my own content, with the comment that it saved this customer “a shitload of money” – thanks John for the mention :), there was a session from Oracle LMS UK (License Management Services).

A few interesting points from their presentation are worth sharing as otherwise you would not get much insight in the working methods of LMS.
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Virtualizing databases has huge financial and operational benefits – in particular with Oracle, where physically deployed database servers are typically heavily under-utilized which leads to huge over-spending on license cost.

Of course poor efficiency on database servers leads to higher processing requirements, to higher number of CPUs purchased, and in turn to massive additional license and maintenance revenue for the software vendor.

No surprise that software vendors attempt to stop or delay efforts to reduce poor efficiency in any way they can, using all the tricks in the playbook plus a number of dirty tricks that you will never find in books on business ethics.

The latest roadblock Oracle has come up with is what we’ll refer to as the VMotion trap.

Disclaimer: I will not be liable for any false, inaccurate, inappropriate or incomplete information presented in this post. If you want to use the information in this post, verify the legal implications yourself or with advise from an independent, specialized 3rd party.

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