Oracle licensing how to license a failover server, Morten details what the 10 day rule in Oracle DR policy document provides to Oracle customers
00:00 Introduction
00:15 The 10 day rule where you do not need to license the failover need.
00:30 To qualify it must be in a cluster and share the same storage.
00:45 Example to explain Oracle licensing in failover.
01:16 What is the 10x 24 hour periods ?
01:45 What about node switching?
02:27 Another example to explain licensing in failover
03:40 Example for how to license DB EE in Failover
Transcript:
Now, here we are going a little bit more into details with the failover rule. This is the one exception, basically, to Oracle’s licensing rule, the 10 Day Free Failover Policy. Oracle Database license gives you the right to run the database on an unlicensed spare computer for up to a total of 10 separate days, and the day is the 24-hour period in any given calendar year. Now to have a proper failover scenario, they need to be in a clustered setup and they need to share the same storage, so that’s the type of arrangement that we’re looking at. In this case, we have only one failover node per environment is free to use for up to 10 days. Even if multiple nodes are configured as failovers, it’s only one that is free for up to 10 days, not both.
That’s one thing to keep in mind when licensing by NUP, minimums are only waived for that one failover node. So 10 separate days we are talking about, you can’t put the hours together. It’s not 240 hours of downtime we are talking about here. It is incident-type of situation, so you don’t count continuously like that. That means if failover node is down two hours on Tuesday, and three hours on Friday, then you have two separate days. In terms of failover, there’s also the possibility of doing node switching. However, switching of nodes is not committed under the 10 Day Free Failover Rule if the primary node, a failover exceeds 10 days in a given calendar year. That’s what you need to consider. In this case, if you have node 1 is configured as the primary node and node 2 as the failover note, when node 1 fails, node 2 acts as the primary node, node 1 is fixed unique to switch back to the original primary node or designate it as failover.
If node 2 acts as the primary node for more than 10 days, you are required to license it. Here we have an example with failover, we have a little bit of multiplexing going on. In this case, 500 Traders going in through an application… Maybe not multiplexing… But they’re going in for an application, so some level of multiplexing is there. We have two servers running in the cluster, they’re sharing the same SAN, and underneath you have the Oracle Database. Node 1 has six processes. Node 2 has four processes. Failsafe… Which if you might recall, is one of these Oracle technologies that can be used configuring failovers… Failsafe is included with the Oracle Database Enterprise Edition, and it’s installed on node 1 and 2, it’s only running on node 1. If node 1 fails, node 2 takes over. So there’s always an idle node when you’re working with failover scenarios, or cluster situations.
How are we going to license this? First of all, we need to license Oracle Database Enterprise Edition. Again, you can use both metrics for this, NUP or Processor metrics. If you’re using Processor, you need to license all the… Well, this is the one exception… You need to license all the Processors where Oracle Software is installed and/or running. In this case, we are talking six, because node 2, you have the failover rights. So you have the rights to run that second node for up to a total of 10 days. That’s your right, so you can run that for your charts. So we don’t have to license it, we just have to manage it, which is, of course, important.
If we were to license this per NUP, we are looking at minimum licensing requirements. So in this case, six times 25 is 150 NUPs. If we are licensing per NUPs, we need to look at the minimums, which we just calculated, and then we need to look at the actual users… in this case, it’s 500… and that means that we need to license whatever is greater. In this case, it’s 500, so that is what is required in a six Processor license of 500 NUPs.
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