What AWS Announced for Oracle on RDS
AWS recently announced a new offering for AWS RDS for Oracle: bare metal instances! What is this? Quite simply RDS instances large enough to consume an entire physical server of capacity. Why is this noteworthy? This is an offering that may be useful to certain Oracle customers from a licensing perspective.
Understanding RDS Licensing Models
There are two licensing options available for running Oracle on RDS: license included (LI) and bring your own license (BYOL). With the LI option, which is only applicable to Oracle SE2 in RDS, you don’t have a contractual relationship with Oracle; you are leasing a license from AWS; note, however, that you can still bring your own license for SE2. For Oracle Database Enterprise Edition, BYOL is the only option.
How Oracle Applies Licensing in Cloud Environments
Oracle’s document Licensing Oracle Software in the Cloud Computing Environment (“cloud policy”), which is an extra-contractual document, allows you to count two vCPUs as equivalent to one Oracle Processor license if multi-threading of processor cores is enabled, and on vCPU as equivalent to one Oracle Processor license if multi-threading of processor cores is not enabled. This is the crucial to being able to run Oracle Database in the cloud, since most instances (VMs) are based on vCPUs – the standard Oracle contract does not make allowances for licensing on a vCPU basis. While this is beneficial Oracle customers wanting to run in the cloud, it has a drawback: licensing on a vCPU basis only allows your Oracle processor licenses to be half as effective as in an on-premises scenario. The reduced effectiveness is because a vCPU (when hyperthreading is enabled) is based on a logical processor, which is effectively a thread of a physical core.
Physical Core Licensing and Why Bare Metal Matters
Some clients may not be aware, but in situations where you can enumerate the number of physical cores that your Oracle Database is running on, you don’t have to use Oracle’s cloud policy; you can continue to utilize the core factor table, just like you would in an on-premises scenario. So, with AWS offering bare metal instances for their Oracle on RDS service, you are getting access to an entire physical host; you can license it using the core factor table! This will almost certainly increase your AWS costs (of course leasing an entire physical host is going to be more expensive than leasing a subset of its resources), but when you consider that the list price for a single processor license of Oracle DBEE is $47,500, the costs make sense. Customers with RDS workloads large enough to consider a bare metal instance can definitely find some licensing advantages.
