Oracle license compliance: Supported rule sets
The Data Update Job transfers data about Oracle devices and usage to Snow License Manager daily at 21:00 (default). At 07:00 the following morning, the Oracle Service updates the Oracle estate topology.[1]
The Oracle service determines the license requirements for Oracle database software and middleware on the clusters and computers inventoried, updating license compliance calculations using two metrics: Processor and Named User Plus minimums.[2]
Note
Recalculating compliance for an Oracle estate can be a lengthy process and is currently available for admin users. To recalculate compliance for your Oracle estate, select Oracle recalculate compliance from the dropdown menu under your username.
The Oracle license requirement calculation rule sets currently covered are:
Oracle Products Standard Edition and any virtualization/physical server (on-premise)
Oracle Products Enterprise Edition on physical servers (no virtualization, on-premise)
Oracle Products Enterprise Edition on soft partitioning[3] on-premise environments (also known as support for soft partitioning)
In soft partitioning scenarios, Oracle does not allow you to license the resources assigned to a virtual machine; you need to license the entire physical infrastructure. This usually happens in VMware environments in a datacenter/cluster.
This rule set calculates the license requirement for these products based on the number of processors in all the combined hosts.
Oracle Products Enterprise Edition on IBM AIX LPAR on-premise environments (also known as support for IBM hard partitioning)
Instead of licensing an entire server, Oracle allows grouping of server resources into logical partitions (LPARs), with one LPAR assigned to a virtual machine, for example. This concept is known as hard partitioning, which is supported by this rule set for LPARs on IBM AIX servers.
This rule set is able to take in most of the required data points for LPARs, using this information to calculate accurately these hard-partitioned environments to support most scenarios.
[1] The Oracle estate topology defines the relationship between datacenters/clusters and computers (virtual machines and physical host servers).
[2] The number of users within the Oracle estate cannot yet be inventoried or manually added to the system. Therefore, the Named User Plus metric is only supported as Named User Plus per processor minimums.
[3] As defined in the Oracle Partitioning Policy, partitioning means that server CPUs are separated, with each section behaving as if it were an individual system.