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mbarlow's avatar
mbarlow
Level 3
5 years ago

Oracle DB licence

Greetings !!

Designing a solution to have a 3 node Oracle 19C database failover cluster. 

From a Oracle product licencing perspective, what can be tweaked to reduce the licencing costs ?

If the binaries are installed on the shared drive as what the admin guide stipulates, do i still need to buy licences for the inactive/passive nodes of the cluster ?

Solaris 11.4 running on LDOMs.

Regards

MB

  • mbarlow 

    Best to confirm Oracle license requirement with Oracle themselves.

    From Veritas perspective, you will need Infoscale licenses for all 3 nodes.

    Where to install Oracle is discussed in the vcs_oracle guide - the choice of local or shared disk should not be based on licensing. 
    Look at advantages and disadvantages under this topic in the manual: 
    Location of the $ORACLE_HOME

  • Oracle has actually made their HA/DR licensing requirement relatively straightforward.  Regardless of the Cluster size,  if the design is active/passive using Single Instance,  then only the active node of the cluster must be licensed.  What's allowed is 10 calendar-days per year which you can failover to an alternate node for testing or HA recovery.  Should you exceed the 10 day threshold, you will need to secure additional licenses. A good example here would be a 3-Node Cluster where 2 nodes are active and 1 is passive (N+1).  In this model only two systems worth of licenses would be needed as the 3rd node would remain passive (aside form the yearly 10 day testing allotment).  DR on the other hand is a different animal.  Oracle stipulates that all DR targets are fully licensed regardless of the whether the software is running.  There is no 10-Calendar day concession for DR.  The composition of the host, be it Physical or Virtual, does not effect this rule, only the core-factor for determining the total license quantity needed.

    Here is a really good reference: https://www.peakindicators.com/blog/oracle-licensing-explained-dr-high-availabilty-and-failover

    Joe D

  • mbarlow 

    Best to confirm Oracle license requirement with Oracle themselves.

    From Veritas perspective, you will need Infoscale licenses for all 3 nodes.

    Where to install Oracle is discussed in the vcs_oracle guide - the choice of local or shared disk should not be based on licensing. 
    Look at advantages and disadvantages under this topic in the manual: 
    Location of the $ORACLE_HOME

  • Oracle has actually made their HA/DR licensing requirement relatively straightforward.  Regardless of the Cluster size,  if the design is active/passive using Single Instance,  then only the active node of the cluster must be licensed.  What's allowed is 10 calendar-days per year which you can failover to an alternate node for testing or HA recovery.  Should you exceed the 10 day threshold, you will need to secure additional licenses. A good example here would be a 3-Node Cluster where 2 nodes are active and 1 is passive (N+1).  In this model only two systems worth of licenses would be needed as the 3rd node would remain passive (aside form the yearly 10 day testing allotment).  DR on the other hand is a different animal.  Oracle stipulates that all DR targets are fully licensed regardless of the whether the software is running.  There is no 10-Calendar day concession for DR.  The composition of the host, be it Physical or Virtual, does not effect this rule, only the core-factor for determining the total license quantity needed.

    Here is a really good reference: https://www.peakindicators.com/blog/oracle-licensing-explained-dr-high-availabilty-and-failover

    Joe D