Oracle users warned over virtualisation software licence risks

"It's simply not clear what Oracle's contractual position is in reference to virtualised hardware," warns software company

Oracle database users running their applications in a virtualised environment using third-party virtualisation software, such as VMware's, could be in "serious breach" of Oracle's software licensing rules - and potentially on the hook for millions in fines and extra software licences.

That is the claim of Carl Davies, managing director at Tmaxsoft, which provides a "drop-in replacement for the Oracle database", and which therefore has a vested interest.

"Nobody is suggesting that Oracle users - be they ISVs or end users themselves - are intentionally running in breach. It is simply not clear what Oracle's contractual position is in reference to virtualised hardware," said Davies.

He continued: "Oracle permits some partitioning technology as a means of limiting the number of software licences required in virtualised environments but it can be unclear which methods are approved and it's easy to misinterpret and fall into non-compliance.

"But ignorance is no defence once Oracle decides to audit an organisations' estate. The one sure result for non-Oracle Virtualisation Machine (OVM) users such as VMware will be significant cost and disruption, and once the audit is complete they will be given 30 days to become compliant again."

Complaints over software vendors' licence auditing programmes have increased as new software licence sales have fallen in recent years. It is not just Oracle that has been the target of user ire, but also Microsoft and SAP, among others.

"To be clear, Oracle does publish an Oracle Partitioning Policy, which makes a distinction between hard and soft-partitioning," said Davies.

"It prohibits the use of many of the most common virtualisation technologies as hard partitioning in order to limit the number of licences required, including Solaris 9 resource containers, AIX workload manager and VMware," he continued.

"However this document has been far from widely publicised and, confusingly, explicitly states that none of these prohibitions can be included in any contract. Despite the fact that Oracle goes to great lengths to describe its partitioning policy, it goes on to suggest that this very policy will not form part of any agreement or contract.

"This is obviously very perplexing and it isn't surprising that some customers are accusing Oracle of promoting misuse of its software to then report that same customer to be out of compliance."

Tmaxsoft has, in the past, accused Oracle of being heavy-handed in its software licence audits, and of coming down hard on users adopting virtualisation within their environments to make their hardware go further.