Oracle Linux KVM vs. Red Hat KVM for Oracle Products

A recent discussion on my forum highlighted the importance of KVM selection for Oracle Customers.

A member of my forum created a thread and mentioned that they are moving their critical E-Business Suite (EBS) system from physical hardware to a virtual environment. They see KVM as the key to proper, aligned licensing ( due to capabilities of hard partitioning and CPU pinning).

So far so good.. But which KVM?

They were using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and they know that KVM is baked into RHEL. So, they were planning to install RHEL, run KVM, and use that to host their Oracle database and EBS. They knew that Oracle Products (database and EBS in this case)  were certified with RHEL. 

However; there was an important distinction there. I mean, the operating system running the application is one thing. The operating system running the hypervisor that is defining your license boundary is another. So we must differentiate...

Oracle's policy on virtualization is clear, technical, and brutally enforced. For you to claim Hard Partitioning (the ability to restrict your Oracle license count to just the cores assigned to the VM), you must use a technology that Oracle explicitly approves.

Oracle has been very specific. You cannot rely on a non-Oracle KVM vendor's implementation of CPU pinning for licensing purposes. 

Yes, Oracle Products will run on RHEL KVM , but it is important to note the following->

Oracle Products are not certified to run on virtual machines/guests provided by Xen or KVM offerin
gs by Red Hat, Novell, SUSE, Ubuntu, Citrix, Nutanix, or XenSource."
So, you may have issues if you go with Redhat and KVM, and if any issues arise, you ll be the one that will try to solve them.. (Redhat may support you but it depends according to the issue type.)

That means, if you run Oracle software on a VM hosted by Red Hat KVM, even if you technically pin the CPUs, there is still a support risk and licensing risk.!

Support Risk / Not Certified: If the issue is related to the virtualization layer, Oracle Support can, and likely will ask you to reproduce the issue on a supported platform. In such a case, you may be the one trying to solve complex kernel-level issues.

Licensing Risk: The license auditor will consider this Soft Partitioning. This means you are liable for licensing the entire physical server's capacity, regardless of your CPU pinning efforts. The cost savings you planned for are gone.

Note: in my opinion; , there is no difference between running an Oracle Linux with Red Hat Compatible Kernel and running a Red Hat Enterprise Linux, binary wise. So it is better to go with Oracle Linux in that sense as well..

That means the only way to use KVM and confidently argue for core-level licensing is to use Oracle Linux KVM.  That is the platform specifically engineered and approved to meet the hard partitioning criteria for Oracle licensing.

Here is that thread about this topic: http://erman-arslan-s-oracle-forum.124.s1.nabble.com/Migration-of-physical-to-vm-licensing-td13040.html

In summary;

Reference MOS Document ID 417770.1 -> Oracle products are not certified to run on guest virtual machines provided by Red Hat's KVM offering.

You can use Redhat KVM but you may issues with Oracle Support (if there is a need) + you may have license -cpu core alignment issues...

Use Oracle Linux KVM..

That's it. Tip of the day:)