OVM vs. vSphere5

intresting reading, thanks for your sharing.

I do like to know if there is any difference between its DB lic on OVM and that on vShpere?

Undoubtly, VMware is the server virtulization market leader comparing to Xen hypervisor Oracle VM use. What's interested me most is the way how Oracle architect their solution. They adopted free redhat VM and customized it, they did the tuning works on Xen part. Just Like Exadata, Oracle was integrating everything and do the vendor locking thing. Even if it may yield better performance due to the pre designing, validation and testing, Customer should be still aware of the high TCO  in the long term run. And they may have lost its choice to migrate out. I also want to mention if customer has multiple applications other than Oracle, VMware definitely is better choice.

About the DB licenses on Oracle VM & vSphere, in this Oracle document

http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/partitioning-070609.pdf

It discusses soft partitioning and hard partitioning.  Soft partitioning is leveraging the Operating System features to limit the number of CPUs an Oracle instance (or Oracle virtual machine) can run on. Hard partitioning physically partitions a large server into smaller self contained servers.

The document lists what Oracle considers valid examples of each type of partitioning. In the document, Oracle specifically defines VMware’s partitioning (and Oracle VM’s partitioning) as soft partitioning. In the document, Oracle states that soft partitioning isn’t a “valid” means of restricting the amount of software licenses and you must license all the processors on a given server.

But later in the document Oracle states that Oracle VM CAN be used for hard partitioning if you set it up as described in

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/virtualization/ovm-hardpart-167739.pdf

which goes into detail on how to bind an OracleVM VM to physical processors / cores. There is no mention in the documents if binding a VMware VM to a physical processor/core would also count as hard partitioning. Oracle does state that their list of partitioning technologies isn’t comprehensive, so things are left open to interpretation.

I feel compelled to respond here. First of all, Oracle is violating their own license agreement by allowing OVM to act as a form of hard partitioning. Further, the only way to enforce the limitations required by Oracle to comply with the document cited above is to use CPU affinity within OVM. This is a very poor practice indeed. VMware vSphere has identical features as OVM with respect to CPU affinity. However, VMware acknowledges that using CPU affinity is not a best practice, and basically defeats many of the core value propositions of virtualization.

Understand clearly: In order to use OVM as a form of hard partitioning, you must enforce CPU affinity. That means live migration cannot occur unless CPU affinity is manually disabled, the VM is migrated, and then CPU affinity is reestablished on the new host. In the process, all of the flexibilty afforded by VMware vSphere in the areas of VMotion, DRS cluster, and the like, are not available.

We have a very good solution to the licensing issue: See the presentation that Sam Lucido and I co-presented at VMworld 2011. Sam also has a Licensing Win Kit which is available for those who are members of the OSE tribe.

I have also posted a PowerPoint which is a recreation of Avinash Nayak's exception blog post comparing OVM 3 to vSphere 5. This PowerPoint can be found here.

Thanks Jeffery for your comments and your sharing, but the presentation is protected by password?  Can I have it through email:  simon.zhao@emc.com.

Also is it possible I can join the OSE tribe?  and how?