Improved support for Oracle licenses

Note:This enhancement is available with IT Asset Management.

Additional fields have been added to the property pages for Oracle Processor and Oracle Named User Plus (NUP) licenses to help manage these license types for Oracle products (including, for example, Oracle Database), particularly when running on cloud instances hosted by an authorized cloud service provider. The improvements also include correct licensing support for Oracle Database Standard Edition 2 (which has superseded Oracle Database Standard Edition and Standard Edition One, and has modified licensing requirements), running either in the cloud or on-premises.

New fields include:

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Minimum users type specifies the underlying unit that may multiply the minimum number of NUP entitlements required. This field refines the use of the previously-available Minimum users field on the Identification tab of NUP license properties. The minimum may be incurred once per server, once per license, or once per processor core.

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For on-premises database servers, the latter case may also involve the Oracle Processor Core Factor Table, which is multiplied by the core count to calculate a value of “Oracle processors”. For example, a single quad-core Intel processor has a core factor of 0.5, so that a server with that configuration running Oracle Database Enterprise Edition under an NUP license on-premises would require 4 cores x 0.5 factor x NUP minimum 25, or at least 50 NUP entitlements (or more, if there are more than 50 devices and humans accessing the database).

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In the cloud, naturally, the processor core factors do not apply. For cloud instances, IT Asset Management correctly calculates one Oracle processor for each vCPU (or thread) when hyper-threading is disabled, or two Oracle processors for each vCPU when hyper-threading is enabled.

All these calculations are driven by a single Points Rule Set applied to Oracle licenses.

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Number of vCPUs per socket is in the Cloud service providers group of the License consumption rules on the Use rights & rules tab for both Oracle Processor and Oracle NUP licenses. Here, the “socket” refers to Oracle's definition of a socket as an equivalent number of vCPUs, a definition that varies by the licensed edition of the product. For example, the Oracle Database Standard Edition 2 license says that one socket (which is worth one NUP license entitlement) covers 4 vCPUs.

Tip:This setting is relevant when the value for Metric (on the Identification tab) is Number of Sockets, such as when licensing Standard Edition products. It has no relevance for licensing Oracle Database Enterprise Edition, for which the Metric settings is Number of Cores.

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Number of vCPUs per server for NUP minimums (only available for Oracle NUP licenses) defines the coverage of vCPUs (on one server) provided by the minimum number of NUP license entitlements. For example, for Oracle Database Standard Edition 2, the minimum number of NUP entitlements required is 10, and these 10 entitlements authorize use of 8 vCPUs in an authorized cloud service provider. In this case, the Minimum users field defines the 10 minimum NUP entitlements required, and this new field defines the 8 vCPUs authorized by that minimum set of NUP entitlements.

Tip:Nobody ever said that Oracle licensing was easy, so the recommended best practice is to record the Oracle SKUs in your purchase records, and create (or add to) licenses by processing those purchase records. When you do this, the SKU library and PURL, updated regularly, set the appropriate values for all these 'dark corners' of your license consumption rules.