Introduction
Running databases on top of a hypervisor has long been common practice. Hypervisors make life better for many reasons like ease of deployment, live migration of virtual machines, etc. However, this powerful technology also makes it very easy to break your licensing for expensive products like the Oracle Database.
With great power comes great responsibility. Oracle Database software is licensed by the physical core. This is certainly true for Oracle Processor licenses, but even Named User Plus licenses have a per-processor minimum. That means that every core in a physical machine has a licensing obligation. I won’t go into all of the rules about how to count things as it can get complex. Be aware that every Nutanix host with Oracle database software installed inside a virtual machine needs to be licensed.
Know that when you click that button with your mouse to live migrate a virtual machine from one host to another, this licensing obligation follows it and can cause enormous problems. That is what I am going to review in this blog.
Scenario
We have been very careful to build our Nutanix cluster for Oracle so that we are in compliance with our licensing. Our cluster consists of 5 physical hosts, 2 compute-only hosts and 3 storage-only hosts. This configuration is just as it sounds, the compute-only hosts are responsible for running virtual machines and provide the compute resources for client workloads. The storage-only hosts serve up hyper-converged storage for the compute workloads. Nutanix provides this CO/SO configuration specifically with licensing in mind. Since no virtual machines can run on SO hosts, there is no end user licensing liability for those hosts. Specifically, we do not need to license any Oracle software on the SO hosts.
Our cluster looks like this:
Cluster – ntx6-ndbprod-dc1
2 – Compute only hosts, each with 16 physical cores
3 – Storage only hosts, each with 32 physical cores\
In this configuration, each CO host requires 8 Oracle licenses, accounting for the Oracle Core Factor of .5 for X86 processors. So, we need 16 licenses for Oracle Database Enterprise Edition and all options and packs in use on the databases.
We have other clusters in our Nutanix environment for other workloads, including general purpose HCI clusters that don’t follow the CO/SO model.
The Problem
Some well-meaning admin thought they would help out and move a virtual machine to a different cluster, for some unknown reason. Or, maybe a VM was moved by accident. Whatever the reason, this caused us a very expensive problem. Luckily, we are monitoring both our Nutanix environment and our Oracle license deployments with Opscompass so we know exactly what happened and what the result is.
One of the powerful features of Opscompass is drift detection. Anytime any resource changes, Opscompass tracks those changes and shows them through drift.
We know that ntx-applicationprod-lx02 is a database virtual machine. Opscompass drift detection shows us that our database VM has moved to a different cluster. This is very bad! Let’s go check out our licensing.
I know we were just in compliance last week. Now we owe Oracle almost $2 million. That is a big problem. Let’s see what is causing this problem.
We own 16 Oracle Database licenses, as well as licenses for the options and packs in use. We are now using 32 licenses for all of that. This must be associated with the drift we just saw where a database virtual machine moved to a different cluster. Let’s see where our workloads are deployed.
Sure enough, Opscompass has identified that we have 16 licenses in use on a host in cluster 3. We only have Oracle licenses for cluster 6. No wonder we’re so badly out of compliance. A 32-core host has our database virtual machine running on it.
Conclusion
Opscompass monitors both the Nutanix environment and Oracle licensing posture. Now that Opscompass has showed us what happened, we can fix the problem before receiving that dreaded audit notice from Oracle.
The following video walks you through this scenario in detail. Watch video
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