I have been reading about the licensing implication of installing Oracle DBs on a VMware cluster. I will number my issues to try and make this more simple.
1. From what I can read so far we have to license (socket or core, depending on the edition of Oracle) the entire VMware cluster that Oracle exists on. There is a lot of conflicting information about whether we can license a subset of the hosts in the cluster. So if we have 10 ESX hosts in our cluster, do we have to license all 10 hosts, or can we use DRS to control which hosts the Oracle VMs can exist on, and potentially only license 5 of the hosts? To make the numbers easy, lets assume each host has 2 CPU sockets, each only having 2 cores (I know they will have more cores, but I just want to keep the numbers easy for now), for a total of 20 CPUs and 40 cores in the host cluster. Lets also assume we are using Enterprise, and need to license based on cores. Do we need to license 40 cores (all 10 hosts) or 20 cores (5 hosts).
2. I have read another issue that talks about needing to license all hosts that are controlled by a single vCenter server. So to extend the example, lets assume that we have 2 clusters. The 10 host cluster identified above, and another smaller 5 host cluster. If the answer to number 1 is that we have to license all 10 hosts, does this requirement then extend to all hosts controlled by the vCenter server? Meaning that we would need to license 15 hosts?
3. Shared storage is another issue which has some conflicting information. I have seen some sites that state that any storage attached to the Oracle licensed host cluster (whatever that number may be), cannot be shared storage. Lets say that the 10 host cluster and the 5 host cluster in the above example both use the same SAN chassis. Each cluster would have separate LUNs assoicated with them. If we only have to license the 10 host cluster in the above scenario, would we then have to license the 5 host cluster as well because they share the same SAN?
I think that is it for now. Thanks for any information.