The Oracle Cloud Policy – Oracle has published a policy called “Licensing Oracle Software in the Cloud Computing Environment”. This document is subject to change at any time (as was the case most recently on January 23, 2018), but it provides customers with the ability to license their workloads by virtual CPU rather than by the. Jan 30, 2017 - The new policy also says: “When counting Oracle Processor license requirements in Authorized Cloud Environments, the Oracle Processor.
More and more end-users are planning to or have been going to a cloud computing environment. Each cloud computing environment comes with its specific restrictions and/or different ways on how to count the required number of Oracle licenses when the Oracle programs are deployed on a cloud computing environment.
Oracle Corporation changed its licensing policies for the so called “Authorized Cloud Environments” since January 23rd, 2017. Initially Oracle stated that for the “Authorized Cloud Environments” (including Amazon Web Services – Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) and Microsoft Azure Platform) end-users would need to consider each virtual core as a physical core (and multiple the amount of virtual cores with the Processor Core Factor of 0.5 to determine the number of ‘Processors” as per Oracle’s Processor definition).
As of January 23rd, 2017, Oracle changed its licensing policies, in which different counting methodologies are applied for both Amazon EC2 and RDS and for Microsoft Azure.
Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS end-users are required to count and license:
two vCPUs = one Oracle Processor license if hyper-threading is enabled
one vCPU = one Oracle Processor license if hyper-threading is not enabled.
Microsoft Azure end-users are required to count and license:
one Azure CPU Core = one Oracle Processor license.
Full details of Oracle’s licensing policies on the “Authorized Cloud Environments” can be found here. This change in licensing policies does support Oracle’s own Cloud Strategy by making its own IaaS and PaaS Cloud Services more attractive (less expensive) than its competitors Amazon and Microsoft.
In the next coming weeks we will publish our newest whitepaper around the licensing of Oracle’s Technology programs on the different cloud providers, including Amazon EC2 and RDS, Microsoft Azure and others.
Don’t miss this new white paper in order to start learning everything about the differences in licensing Oracle software on these different cloud environments!
Richard is one of the managing partners at B-lay. He started to work in the license management industry in 2004 and worked for almost 10 years at Oracle as regional director of compliance. He uses his knowledge of enterprise software vendors (such as Oracle, SAP, IBM and Microsoft) to educate, equip and enable software end users in their challenges regarding proper software license management. Richard holds a master’s degree in IT, from University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.
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Oracle Database licensing on AWS is based on the size of the instance on which the database is installed. For information about Oracle Database licensing, please refer to your Oracle contract on license terms. You can consult with independent third-party license review firms on specific licensing questions and planning on AWS instances. Reach out to your AWS sales representative for more information. A few key points to consider are:
- As stated in Amazon EC2 Instance Types page, each vCPU is a thread of either an Intel Xeon core or an AMD EPYC core, except for A1 instances, T2 instances, and m3.medium.
- AWS offers optimize CPU feature in RDS and EC2 instances. You can specify the following CPU options to optimize your instances for specific workload or business needs.
- Number of CPU cores: You can customize the number of CPU cores for the instance.
- Threads per core: You can disable multithreading by specifying a single thread per CPU core.
- VMware Cloud on AWS also offers custom CPU core count feature for its host nodes. You have an option of selecting 8, 16, or 36 CPU cores per host for I3, or selecting 8, 16 or 48 CPU cores for R5 host type.
- Any discussion of Oracle licensing policies and costs in this whitepaper is for informational purposes only and is based on the information available at the time of publication. For more specific information, users should consult their own Oracle license agreements.
Amazon RDS License Included
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You have the option to include the cost of the Oracle Database license in the hourly price of the Amazon RDS service if you use the License Included service model. In this case, you do not need to purchase Oracle licenses separately; the Oracle Database software has been licensed by AWS. License Included per-hour pricing includes software, underlying hardware resources, and Amazon RDS management capabilities. This service model optimizes license costs, and gives you flexibility when scaling your Amazon RDS instances up or down. You can take advantage of hourly pricing with no upfront fees or long-term commitments. In addition, you can purchase Amazon RDS Reserved Instances under one-year or three-year reservation terms. With Reserved Instances, you can make a low, one-time payment up front for each database instance, and then pay a significantly discounted hourly usage rate.
Note: The hourly license for the License Included model in Amazon RDS is available only for Oracle Standard Edition One and Standard Edition Two. For other editions of Oracle Database on Amazon RDS and any edition of Oracle Database on Amazon EC2, you need to use your own license (that is, acquire a license from Oracle), as discussed in the following section.
Since you are paying for the Oracle license only for the hours in which you use Amazon RDS, the License Included option may help you reduce overall licensing costs for development and testing environments that are active only during business hours. For most businesses, the total business hours per week (10 x 5 = 50 hours) is only about 30% of the total hours in a week (24 x 7 = 168 hours), so this service model could result in considerable savings.
This service model also gives you the flexibility to resize the instance based on your needs, because the license is included in the instance cost. In cases where your regular capacity requirements are much smaller than periodic, predictable spikes, this service model allows you to scale up to absorb the additional capacity needed, and scale down to save on cost. For example, you might have databases that require the performance of a db.m3.large instance for most days of the month except for the last three days. During the last three days of the month, your database might be heavily used due to payroll processing and month-end closing. In this scenario, you can use Oracle Database on Amazon RDS based on the db.m3.large instance type throughout the month, scale up to db.m3.2xlarge for the last three days, and then scale down again. This could translate to 65% or more cost savings compared to using the db.m3.2xlarge instance for the whole month.
Bring Your Own License (BYOL)
If you already own Oracle Database licenses, you can use the BYOL service model to run your Oracle databases on Amazon RDS. This will result in a lower cost for the Amazon RDS instance because the cost of the Oracle license isn’t included. The BYOL model is designed for customers who prefer to use their existing Oracle Database licenses or purchase new licenses directly from Oracle.
If you want to use Oracle Database Enterprise Edition with Amazon RDS, or run your own self-managed Oracle Database on Amazon EC2 or VMware Cloud on AWS, BYOL is the only supported option.
Oracle License Portability to AWS
Subject to the terms and conditions of the specific license agreement, Oracle licenses may be portable to AWS. In other words, your existing licenses can be transferred for use on AWS. These include:
- Server-based licenses (based on CPUs used)
- Enterprise License Agreements (ELA)
- Unlimited License Agreements (ULA)
- Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) licenses
- Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) licenses
- Named User Plus licenses
Additional conditions or limitations (including possible costs) may be applicable for licenses that are ported to AWS. Please check your specific license agreement for additional details and limitations.
Oracle licensing applies similarly to Oracle Database on Amazon RDS and on Amazon EC2 with the exception that hourly licensing is available only on Amazon RDS.