Industry Blog

Oracle’s VMware Policy Is Laughable

12th Oct 2020

I cannot believe I am writing (again) about Oracle’s infamous, nonsensical, and punitive policy for VMware. Yet here I am. Oracle just updated its Partitioning Policy document to cover Docker and Kubernetes and therein remains the ambiguous reference to VMware. Perhaps Oracle’s opinion of VMware made sense 10 or 15 years ago . . . not anymore.

As VMware has matured, this policy has vMotioned into “laugh out loud” territory

And, yes, the terrible pun IS intended. It’s equally baffling why any customer would agree to pay a grossly misaligned amount of money to run Oracle software in VMware given the publicly available discourse against doing so.

Once we let our customers in on the joke and their eyes are opened, then we may proceed to get their money back from Oracle. While this is not easy once the perpetual obligation is executed, it is possible. In our view, it’s wrong and it must be righted.

So, if you are uninformed, confused, insecure, scared, or worse yet, actually paying Oracle based on its VMware policy, then reach out to us.  We won’t judge you in any way!

This includes anyone that got bullied or duped into a ULA (unlimited agreement) and then certified thousands of Processors accordingly.

Did your predecessor fall prey, long before you took over the spend?

You’ll know when you see hundreds or thousands of Processors of anything within a single line item in the annual support contracts. It looks like a 90-something percent discount on hundreds of millions of list license value. No one uses anywhere near that much database software at that discount.

Over-paying comes in many forms. In this case, you are compensating Oracle to satisfy its “galaxy licensing” policy when the actual compute capacity dedicated to Oracle is a fraction of the VMware environment.

Some of Oracle’s policies (still) make sense. For example, we think it’s reasonable to pay Oracle for standby databases, especially if they are open for reporting. Other policies are antiquated past the point of credulity. Oracle’s policy for VMware reminds us of funny old laws that may have made sense in the 1800s, remain on the books, but are no longer enforced.

In any case, Oracle LMS is still enforcing its VMware policy on anyone that is willing to pay.

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