Hi, <Disclaimer: I’m the Product Management Director for Oracle Linux /> On 11 Jul 2014, at 10:50 am, Peter Ross <Petros.Listig@fdrive.com.au> wrote:
it looks as my company wants to buy a product requiring Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Oracle DB.
Oracle Linux is significantly cheaper than RHEL and you should consider it.
I guess two licenses are the right solution if you want to install Red Hat on bare metal and VMs and containers on it (in short, not being restricted by licensing)
In comparison, Oracle Linux is $499/year for unlimited guests on a 2-socket box.
"Standard Edition One" $US 5800 per processor. Makes it $US 11 600 per machine (or $US 5800 in case I restrict it to a VM with one CPU - is it actually possible?)
It’s not with Standard Edition One, or with any x86-based virtualisation product except Oracle VM. However, note that for some Oracle product licensing a CPU != a socket, but a core. So, if those are 2x 10-core CPUs, you actually have 20 CPUs to license, not 2. Threads are not licensed, just cores. I can’t remember if SE1 is a per-socket or per-core licensed product, so I recommend getting advice from an Oracle RDBMS sales person. If you send me your details off-list, I can put you in touch with something.
Is it possible to setup in any meaningful way a second DB server as a stand-by server without paying an additional Oracle license?
Yes, you are permitted 10 days per year to be in failover mode without purchasing an additional DB license. This assumes bare-metal deployment and shared storage between the nodes: http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/data-recovery-licensing-070587.pd...
And then there is $US 1276 "software update license & support". Without that no updates?
For RDBMS? Correct.
In short, my boss would not like to pay more than needed but we need to be sure to have a working setup at the end.
Cheaper option: 1. Oracle VM for two 2-socket servers: Oracle VM Premier Limited @ $599/box 2. Oracle Linux for two 2-socket servers: Oracle Linux Basic Limited @ $499/box (unlimited VMs) 2a. Consider getting Oracle Linux Premier Limited @$1399/box which includes lifetime support, backporting, Ksplice and XFS support over the Basic offering which includes Clusterware and EM12c sport 3. Oracle Standard Edition One for a single server Then, use Oracle VM’s HA to allow you to migrate the VM from one box to another to do hardware maintenance (or in the event of hardware failure of the primary box). What’s more, you can run additional VMs on the standby box (perhaps for development/test) and just shut them down if you need the resources. Oracle VM allows you to license just the sockets/cores in use, so if you only run RDBMS on one physical box, you only license a single physical box. Even better, with sub-capacity licensing (known as hard partitioning in Oracle VM) you can reduce the per-CPU cost for some Oracle products (but possibly not with SE1 which is a per-socket product, AFAIK). For questions like this, it’s a good idea to get an Oracle RDBMS sales person on the line to step you through the licensing options to make sure you’re licensing by the right component. Happy to help off-list to connect you to some Oracle people. Cheers, Avi