LMT Episode 03 - 5 Fatal Licence Mistakes

So news last month of Thomas Kurian, Larry Ellison and Flexcube in the cloud. The featured article this episode is one of our most popular posts, “5 Fatal Mistakes of Oracle licensing.” For all you kind people who have downloaded, please provide feedback and questions. We would love to address any questions on the show. I am currently reaching out to a bunch of very interesting people to have on the show. If you would like to be on the show please get in touch. Thomas Kurian Promoted to President Almost four months since Larry Ellison handed his CEO title to both Safra Catz and Mark Hurd, he has now promoted Thomas Kurian to President. The forty-eight year old was EVP for product development having started his Oracle career leading the Middleware strategy. He helped take Oracle to a leader in the Middleware with the suite of Middleware tools. Larry helps the critters Larry is clearly a busy man and is putting some of his substantial wealth to helping establish a Wildlife breeding and animal rehab centre in the Santa Cruz mountains. Read more at NBC The Bay Area News Oracle Cloud runs a new UK Bank Hampden & Co. will be running Oracle’s core banking solution Flexcube on Oracle cloud. Oracle will run the application as a managed service on Oracle Sparc T5 out of the UK Oracle data center in Linlithgow, just outside Edinburgh, Scotland. Hampden Group run a diversified set of services in the insurance and finance sectors. They announced last year that they would be taking a significant stake in a new bank for private clients called Hampden & Co plc. oracle licensing rules – 5 Fatal Mistakes “Five Fatal Oracle License Mistakes”, alright the title is a bit dramatic, but the following 5 mistakes crop up on such a regular basis that we at Madora believe they are worth reiterating. For those experienced with Oracle, they will know the following as classic gotchas and will keep an eye out. IT professionals and Procurement Officers new to the ways of Oracle may get caught out – so be warned. Let’s walk through some of the five common areas that often have disastrous consequences. The Five Fatal Mistakes are: 1. Virtualising without fully understanding the implications. The issue we see time after time is misunderstanding Oracle licensing on VMware. So why is this? It’s to do with server partitioning. Server partitioning can be very confusing; it is designed to limit the amount of processor resource available to a program; it is nothing to do with the Oracle Database Partitioning extra cost option – that is a means of partitioning data tables. Oracle simplifies server partitioning into two groups; the methods that it refuses to recognise as valid, known as “Soft Partitioning”; and those it accepts really do subdivide servers, known as “Hard Partitioning”. Probably the most popular server partitioning method is VMware, a very flexible form of partitioning and a great means of managing a datacentre. Guess what? It is soft partitioning for Oracle; this means that it is incredibly easy to fall foul of Oracle’s licensing rules. How your VCenter is set up, the clusters, the VMs, the storage architecture all have an impact on licensing. VMware publish guidelines on how to license Oracle but Oracle don’t support their view; great fun when it is your turn for Oracle’s regular license audit! Oracle’s approach to VMware has changed even further since the release of VMware Version 5.1 with its more advanced DRS/VMotion capabilities and its shared storage functionality. Seek independent help to review your architecture and any planned changes; don’t assume anything!! 2. Disaster Recovery scenarios not licensed correctly This can be a complex area with technologies changing all the time. We highly recommend you speak to Madora Consulting if you have any doubts as to whether you are correctly licensed for DR architectures. In general we advise that you assume you need to be licensed fully and then check to see if your scenario falls under failover and whether the 10 day rule applies. In terms of licensing be aware that you cannot mix metrics. In other words if processors are used for the primary site then the backup site also needs to be licensed by processor. A common mistake is believing that Named User Plus licenses can be used for the backup site – in the hope of saving money. You are better off ring fencing the DR servers contractually and negotiating a reduced cost for this license pool. Also make sure that the options and management packs are licensed, as these are often forgotten. In short, scenarios where the Primary and Secondary nodes share a SAN, with the secondary node acting as a failover, only the Primary needs to be licensed. This is valid as long as the failover to the secondary lasts less than 10 days per year, which includes any testing. Any standby or mirroring environments must be fully licensed. See the Oracle paper on DR pricing http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/data-recovery-licensing-070...