One of Miro’s clients recently asked us to review a purchasing option they were given by their hardware vendor.
Miro was recently asked by one of our clients to look at a deal their hardware vendor was offering. The client wanted to buy 8 core servers, but do to supply chain issues, the hardware vendor didn’t have any to sell. Instead, the vendor offered to sell the client 16 core bare metal servers for the same price of the smaller 8 core model.
Unfortunately, this doubled their licensing footprint and we had to break it to them that the additional cost of licensing the Oracle software for a single 16-core server, instead of 8 cores, would cost them over $2 million list price & support from Oracle, plus the on-going annual support costs year-after-year.
Miro was able to make recommendations where the client was able to purchase the 16 core servers but still only use and pay licensing costs for them as if they were 8 core servers.
We recommended that the client consider Oracle’s software licensing policies when it comes to how to specifically deploy Oracle products, and how different virtualization methods work and affects licensing. There are approaches and methods of deployment that can address and limit hidden costs like this. Miro recommended virtualization as a solution, like Oracle KVM or VMware, and to make sure it was set up correctly. Virtualization mistakes are a very common cause of costly licensing audit failures.
Considerations:
- A BIOS level change is not an acceptable method to Oracle to reduce processing power; it must be a physical or hardware-native feature.
- Find out about how you can take advantage of Oracle Linux KVM virtualization here.
- Are you using VMware? Find out more about why you should to segment Oracle on VMware here.
- Can you wait until 2023 or 2024, when the semiconductor shortage is expected to ease?
Need Help or Have Questions?
Miro can help you to evaluate your current or potential compliance and risks. We can let you know if you are currently in compliance, help you configure your systems to save on costs, to avoid an unnecessary purchases, or help negotiate on your behalf with Oracle in the case of an audit.