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Oracle overview

The Enterprise > Oracle overview section in Snow License Manager enables asset management of your Oracle products by showing detailed information about your Oracle environment.

Description​

Oracle licensing is complex, with intricate rules and dependencies. To determine if you are correctly licensed, you need to know which Oracle products are installed and used in your IT environment. In addition, you need to know the hardware configuration of the servers running Oracle, as well as have full control over all Oracle agreements and orders.

The Oracle overview section provides visibility of your Oracle Databases, Fusion Middleware, and Oracle Java products, as well as license requirements, license assignments, and compliancy position for the Oracle Databases plus their Options and Management packs, and for Oracle WebLogic Server. The section is divided in tabs:

  • The Overview Products tab summarizes the license compliance and costs for your Oracle products in key figures and charts.

  • The Recommendations tab gives you an overview of potential optimization opportunities in your Oracle environment.

  • The Products tab gives you visibility of all inventoried Oracle Databases, Oracle Fusion Middleware, and Java installations in your environment.

  • On the Entitlements tab you can view all registered Oracle agreements, orders, and the compliance status for all your virtual machines, physical servers, and datacenters or clusters. You can also register new agreements and orders and manage license assignments.

    While the information from the inventoried Oracle environments, gathered by the Oracle scanners, is supplied automatically to Snow License Manager, all Oracle agreements must be registered manually. You must also register your Oracle orders (entitlements), either one by one or through a bulk order file import. Furthermore, you must associate the Oracle orders with the Oracle servers, which you can do either manually or by using the Oracle auto-assignment functionality.

  • The Reports tab gathers all available Oracle related reports, for example, the Oracle Product Compliance report.

  • The Oracle verified data tab enables you to download a ZIP file with Oracle Database, Oracle Fusion Middleware, and Java SE data that Oracle accepts as an alternative to installing Oracle tooling. Note that the tab is not available by default for all users.

Oracle license compliance: Supported rule sets​

The metrics Processor and Named User Plus minimums are used when determining license requirements for Oracle Databases (their Options and Management Packs) and Middleware (WebLogic Server) on the inventoried clusters and computers, and when updating the license compliance calculations.

note

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.

The currently covered Oracle license requirement calculation rule sets are:

  • Oracle (Databases and WebLogic Server) Standard Edition and virtualization/physical server (on-premises)

  • Oracle (Databases and WebLogic Server) Enterprise Edition on physical servers (no virtualization, on-premises)

  • Oracle (Databases and WebLogic Server) on soft partitioning on-premises environments (also known as support for soft partitioning)

    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.

    • 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 (Databases and WebLogic Server) on IBM AIX LPAR on-premises 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 accurately calculate these hard-partitioned environments to support most scenarios.

    • The benefit from the hard partitioning licensing is that the user can make the environment compliant assigning the least amount of licenses based on the LPARs containing Oracle products.