It’s finally here! We can finally approve licensing sub-clusters for Oracle in VMware Cloud on AWS. (Actually, it turns out that it’s been here since February, but the technical details weren’t published.)

In the on-premise world, sub-cluster licensing can be enforced using DRS affinity and anti-affinity rules. In VMware Cloud on AWS, that same enforcement can be done via tags. We recently had a session with VMware and Amazon that convinced us that tags are sufficient to ensure license compliance. More details on how to implement to come in the next few weeks along with enhancements to LicenseFortress Discovery to monitor tags just like it monitors DRS rules. For now, take a look at this blog post from Sudhir Balasubramanian, Oracle Staff Solution Architect at VMware.

But this now allows for licensing as few as 8 cores of Oracle workloads in VMware Cloud on AWS. Note: this would be 1 host in an 8-core, custom CPU count cluster. This is only possible if you are running a single VM with Oracle workloads in the VMware Cloud on AWS. For multiple VMs, customers would have to license the additional maintenance host, so that would be a 16 core minimum even though the customer would be only utilizing 8 cores on a regular basis.

But this gives new options for customers looking to run Oracle in the VMware Cloud on AWS. And of course, we protect these scenarios with LicenseFortress Premier, which includes the industry’s only financial guarantee. Please reach out to us at info@licensefortress.com to discuss your specific needs and how we can help get the maximum value out of your Oracle software licenses.