Introduction

Cloud Hosting is still in it's infancy and whilst there are many DataCente's and Hosting Companies now offering 'Cloud' based services there are few that can offer Oracle Software Hosting.

Why so few?

The reason for this is that Oracle traditionally has licensed their products based upon the number of processors an cores in the physical server. This means that the licence requirements are based upon physical machines.

Why does this make things difficult?

The reason for the difficulty is that many Cloud based platforms share resources and therefore share server processors via Virtualisation software. whilst a shared environment reduces the cost of the server platform in Oracle's Terms is based upon the number of physical processor.

An Example of Virtualisation Problem

So A Virtual Machine may only use 1 Processors worth of processing allocation but reside on an 8 Processor server (Shared Resources).  However, the licensing of that environment would not be 1 Licence but 8 based upon the Physical box. In Oracle terms this can get very expensive.

Support Myths

There have been a lot of myths and mis-information regarding whether Oracle will support Virtualised environments, this was before Oracle produced Oracle Virtual Machines (Oracle VM).

The Official line is that Oracle will support Virtual Systems however should an issue but raised it is a requirement to demonstrate and prove that the issue is also replicable on the software on a physical box.

Oracle Hosting

Whilst Oracle is certified to run on Oracle Virtual Machines many Hosting Companies have not moved from VMware to Oracle VM and therefore are not able to leverage fully the Cloud benefits without a solution becoming prohibatively expensive.

However, Amazon Web Services owing to their parent company (Amazon Books) having developed a very strong relationship with Oracle to the extent that their Cloud Offering is fully certified against many of Oracle's products including pay-as-you-use Database Instances called RDS