How to count the license consumption for Oracle software in cloud environments like Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services?

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Oracle refers to Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Serives as so called “Authorized Cloud Environments”. IMPORTANT: The Oracle Core Factor Table cannot be used for Oracle Software in “Authorized Cloud Environments” keine Anwendung. To determine the processor license need, the following rules apply:

  • for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (ED2) and Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)
    • if hyper-threading is activated, two vCPUs equal one Oracle processor license
    • if hyper-threading is deactivated, one vCPU equals one Oracle processor license
  • for Microsoft Azure:
    • if hyper-threading is activated, two vCPUs equal one Oracle processor license
    • if hyper-threading is deactivated, one vCPU equals one Oracle processor license

RESTRICTION: for products with the addition of “Standard Edition One”, “Standard Edition 2” or “Standard Edition” the following rules apply per instance:

  • for Amazon Web Services
    • 1 instance with
  • for Microsoft Azure
    • 1 instance with

If one instance has more than 4 vCPUs (AWS or Azure), it will always be rounded up in steps of four. That is, one instance with 6 vCPUs will be rounded up to 8 vCPUs and therefore causes a greater license consumption.

Example 1: a Weblogic Server Enterprise Edition instance on AWS with 2 vCPUs and activated hyper-threading: 1 Oracle processor license Example 2: a Database Standard Edition 2 instance on Azure with 10 vCPUs: 3 Oracle processor licenses

Named User Plus licensing is also applicable to “Authorized Cloud Environments”. The minimal requirements must always be meet.

Sources:

Whitepaper_Oracle_Licensing Oracle Software in the Cloud Computing Environment 2018-01-23 (document may not be reproduced, but can be accessed from the following url: www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/cloud-licensing-070579.pdf), retrieved 2018-11-21

Oralce_Authorized Software for Cloud Computing Environment 2018-11-05 (document may not be reproduced, but can be accessed from the following url: https://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/authorized-cloud-environments-3493562.pdf), retrieved 2018-11-21