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

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