licensing (oracle, sql,...) reporting

[ivordillen]

We have a seperate cluster for oracle nodes because of the oracle licensing features.

Is there a possibility to create a rapport that gives me a quick view of host where a machine can boot (for instance with the constraining factors, datastore, cluster, cpu)

Maybe also a vmotion history overview over a set periode of time?

kind regards,

Ivor

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Ivor,

I'm not sure what the host requirements are, but you may want to try to build a report with a required set of properties via Custom Infrastructure report. This report will give you an overview of all possible settings and hardware resources your hosts might have.

Besides, we have a predefined host configuration report that provides general host configuration information, including available resources and network configuration, might be worth checking out.

Thanks!

[ivordillen]

Hi Vitaliy,

The host configuration report doesn't specify the datastores and stuff.

I really think a license compliancy report would be a major asset in the reporing tool. We all have SQL, sybase, oracle, sharepoint, iis, ... and all of us have to have some licensing spreadsheet. An error in the placement of a vm could have hughe consequences because for instance an oracle that can boot on the wrong cluster equals $$ x CPU.

So I think it could end up on the wishlist to have a report that gives me a list of all my vm's with their name, vcpu number, their cluster, cpu's in cluster, and maybe the extra possibility to add an extra line that states that vm could not be 'very' easily be vmotioned because the datastore is not presented to the other vmware cluster.

Licensing gives us sometimes really bad configs because every vendor has it's own rules towards cpu, clustering...

[Vitaliy S.]

Yes, custom infrastructure report might be a better choice in this case, anyway thanks for the feedback!

[ashleyw]

Hi Ivor, quick question on Oracle licensing (sorry off topic).. I assume you are referring to hard and soft partitioning licensing rules under Oracle. How have you been able to split your clusters for Oracle? We're sitting with the same issues and the only "safe" way we can is to use OVM as we couldn't find a way to license Oracle legally other than the total number of CPU cores per cluster (using commodity gear of 12 core, 96gb ram hosts, would mean a 2 node VMware cluster would legally need to be licensed for 24 cores). Just interested to hear how others have worked around this - if you take the pro-EMC/VMware favourable stance on Oracle partitioning rules on this, then I'm guessing you'll need a good lawyer!

On our production hosting, all the Oracle related hosting sits outside of VMware specifically because of these silly Oracle partitioning rules.

[ivordillen]

We created a seperated esx-oracle cluster of 2 nodes 2 time 2 sockets and we made sure the datastores were only presented to the cluster. So there is a logical and physical bridge.

Because we don't use oracle enterprise but only the standard edition we only have to pay for 2 x 2 sockets.

We have a oracle rac but this one is fully physical and here is the ratio core x 0.5 (if we speak of intel cpu).

Kind regards,

Ivor