Cloudy with a chance of licensing.

[Daniel Matthis]

A co-worker and I were discussing some issues regarding licensing for vm's. In short Oracle, Microsoft and RedHat for that matter, have some issues with licensing for VM's. Specifically they all seem to operate under the "if it isn't our VM solution then you get no support" or "if it's not our VM solution you pay big time". 

Now I don't know if this is all true. I hope some of you can speak to the various licensing issues. The comment that came from my co-worker is that Oracle and Microsoft are doomed with the cloud because they still license the way they did in the 70's. Give some resent conversations I do have to wonder how Oracle thinks they will entice many people in the "cloud" market given their all-or-nothing approach.

How does licensing affect the cloud solutions that are offered? At least from the provider aspect.

How do these licensing terms impact technology selection and the future growth of "cloud/utility computing"?

--
- "Y fyn Duw a fydd" 

[Leon Katsnelson]

There is no question that Oracle in particular has a very predatory licensing strategy when it comes to virtualization. For their database products, if you are nto running on their hypervisor then you have to reproduce the problem on bare metal hardware to get support. Yeah, like that is ever going to happen. They are able to do these policies because they can. It is basically a strategy to leverage market dominance in one area to  establish dominance in another. Highly questionable and at times not 100% legal practice. Oracle has their eye set on VMWare and it is not the cloud that drives this but cloud does become collateral damage.

Having said that, Oracle senior management is a very nimble and will react very quickly if need be. So, vote with your $ and you may see this change.

Leon Katsnelson
tel: +1-647-201-6275

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Contact me: leon.katsnelson leon.ka...@gmail.com

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[daniel@dumdan]

I am not sure the Red Hat's situation is well described.

I know, for a fact, that one license for a VM-installable RHEL allows
the installation of tens, if not hundreds, of instances. I can see
them, all, in the RHN inventory (assuming you are familiar with RHN
and the Red Hat registration systems).
Also, the "host" for those VMs is allowed to be Red Hat's solution
(RHEV, RHEL), VMware's ESX or a Xen-based one. Nor sure about
Microsoft and Virtual Box (Oracle).
When you reach the point you have to make the purchasing decision,
talk to them.
My experience has been that they won't go out of their way to offer
bargains, mostly because their licensing model is quite fair to begin
with.

As for what Oracle's direction might be - I am not ready to say much.
Mostly because of the "slight" change in their position vis-a-vis the
licensing of quite a few "Sun" software products. VirtualBox is such a
"previously Sun product".
On top of that, the recent "row" over the way Red Hat is distributing
kernel patches (for RHEL 6) doesn't inspire much confidence in their
ability to manage properly their own Linux "ecosystem", either.

Daniel

On Mar 16, 3:29 pm, Leon Katsnelson <leon.katsnel...@gmail.com> wrote:
> There is no question that Oracle in particular has a very predatory
> licensing strategy when it comes to virtualization. For their database
> products, if you are nto running on their hypervisor then you have to
> reproduce the problem on bare metal hardware to get support. Yeah, like that
> is ever going to happen. They are able to do these policies because they
> can. It is basically a strategy to leverage market dominance in one area to
>  establish dominance in another. Highly questionable and at times not 100%
> legal practice. Oracle has their eye set on VMWare and it is not the cloud
> that drives this but cloud does become collateral damage.
>
> Having said that, Oracle senior management is a very nimble and will react
> very quickly if need be. So, vote with your $ and you may see this change.
>
> Leon Katsnelson
> tel: +1-647-201-6275
> My profiles: [image: LinkedIn]

> <http://ca.linkedin.com/in/leonkatsnelson> [image:
> Twitter] <http://www.twitter.com/katsnelson> [image:
> Facebook]<http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=521106955>

> Contact me: [image: Skype/] leon.katsnelson [image: Google Talk/]

> leon.katsnel...@gmail.com
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> WiseStamp<http://www.wisestamp.com/email-install?utm_source=extension&utm_mediu...>

>
> On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 12:25 PM, Daniel Matthis

> <daniel.matt...@gmail.com>wrote:

>
> > A co-worker and I were discussing some issues regarding licensing for vm's.
> > In short Oracle, Microsoft and RedHat for that matter, have some issues with
> > licensing for VM's. Specifically they all seem to operate under the "if it
> > isn't our VM solution then you get no support" or "if it's not our VM
> > solution you pay big time".
>
> > Now I don't know if this is all true. I hope some of you can speak to the
> > various licensing issues. The comment that came from my co-worker is that
> > Oracle and Microsoft are doomed with the cloud because they still license
> > the way they did in the 70's. Give some resent conversations I do have to
> > wonder how Oracle thinks they will entice many people in the "cloud" market
> > given their all-or-nothing approach.
>
> > How does licensing affect the cloud solutions that are offered? At least
> > from the provider aspect.
> > How do these licensing terms impact technology selection and the future
> > growth of "cloud/utility computing"?
>
> > --
> > - "Y fyn Duw a fydd"
>
> > --
> > ~~~~~
> > 3rd Annual Cloud Slam 2011 Conference * April 18-22, 2011 * Mountain View,

> > CA *http://cloudslam.org

> > UP 2010 Conference:http://www.up-con.com
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>
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> >http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004L1755W,

> >http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002H0IW1Uor GET instant access to

> > downloadable versions at
> > -http://www.up-con.com/register
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[Manav Gupta]

In most private cloud offerings that I've been working on, I've seen IBM (my employer), and competitors such as EMC, VMWare, and others offer "consumption" pricing (or pay as you go pricing), with "some" upfront commitment. With all "cloud" provisioning software, they are able to track usage, which is periodically reviewed and they perform a true-up based on actual usage. Some vendors will charge you interest as well, since most of the companies are still stuck in perpetual licensing mode. 

>>How does licensing affect the cloud solutions that are offered? At least from the provider aspect.

Typically from the provider aspect, there's the issue of determining whether they will have a permanent (or illusion thereof) footprint, unlike in a typical licensing environment. One of the fears I hear is of being replaced by another technology (more easily than in traditional model).  Then there's the issue of tracking usage, which is easy for IaaS offering, but not so much for SaaS offering. The other issue is of truly determining a "user" in the cloud environment, for software that has been traditionally licensed in a per-user model (for example, software for identity management). How do you classify and track whether it's an internal user or external user, etc?

>> How do these licensing terms impact technology selection and the future growth of "cloud/utility computing"?

Personally, this is forcing the technology providers to change their mindset - and I find the larger companies are slower at this mindset shift. This is also affecting the adoption of cloud computing. For example, when sizing a typical private cloud, how many virtual machines do you size the hardware for? 100 might be too less, 1000 may be too far a target. Then again, if a customer starts off with say 100 virtual machines, do they invest in provisioning more physical hardware upfront, or as capex? Moving higher from IaaS, what volume of usage commitment should the provider ask for and consumer commit to? 

Some of these challenges are political; others technological. For example, the usage and accounting facilities in cloud / utility computing have to graduate to model the real-world better. There should then be an Amazon like capability to track your license usage, and then have the flexibility to pay for software licenses on either peak, average or current usage...

[Ian Mills]

You have to understand the economics that are driving the software
vendors. Today with limited virtualisation the average server is
running at less than 10% utilisation but pays full software license
and support charges. We know from IBM mainframes, which have been
virtualised for over twenty years, that a server utilisation in a
fully virtualised environment can be around 40%. This has means there
is the potential for the software vendors to have their revenues
reduced to one quarter of what they otherwise would be. No business
could survive that, so they are fighting for their lives, and you have
to expect the very worst of behaviours.

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--
Ian Mills
0755 394 6958
Service to the customer, the pursuit of excellence, respect for the individual.

[Juan J.]

On Wed, 2011-03-16 at 16:59 -0700, daniel@dumdan wrote:
> [..]

> On top of that, the recent "row" over the way Red Hat is distributing
> kernel patches (for RHEL 6) doesn't inspire much confidence in their
> ability to manage properly their own Linux "ecosystem", either.

Context: Daniel is talking about a recent change in Red Hat about the
way they provide kernel patches for their open source operative system.
Previously, RHEL 5 provided the vanilla kernel and a set of patches, now
with RHEL 6 they are providing the source already patched.

This will cause trouble for Oracle, because their "Unbreakable
Enterprise Linux Kernel" it's based in RHEL kernel, and now they don't
have a easy way to review the patches Red Hat applies to the kernel.

So Daniel is talking about Oracle ecosystem, and I agree with him.

Cheers,

Juanjo

--
Juan J. Martínez
Development, MEMSET

mail: ju...@memset.com
web: http://www.memset.com/

Memset Ltd., registration number 4504980. 25 Frederick Sanger Road, Guildford, Surrey, GU2 7YD, UK.

[Amy Wohl]

Please note that depends on how the vendor can charge for software. Right
now, some vendors think that they can charge for instances of virtualized
software or by the user not by the server (or both). That may not be
sustainable, but it's sure going on.

Amy

Amy D. Wohl
Editor, Amy Wohl's Opinions
1954 Birchwood Park Drive North
Cherry Hill, NJ 08003
856-874-4034
a...@wohl.com
www.wohl.com

[Daniel Matthis]

@Amy,

Agreed. As someone stated earlier they large corps are slow to change, which means there will possibly be new players that simply out compete the major corps as they have a business model that can work with demand.

That said are we actually seeing an impact now? Or will we simply see major corps look at acquiring the young upstarts? 

[Amy Wohl]

Some of all of that:

 

·         People are definitely doing business with the upstarts because that is where the action starts.

·         All the big enterprise vendors (IBM, HP, Oracle) are now in the cloud game

·         Microsoft is definitely going to be  player; I just think most of the big enterprise customers, who are usually slower to move than their vendors, are going to use traditional vendors for system management.

·         Of course some of the young upstarts will be acquired – all of the enterprises are on a software acquisition binge and cloud computing is right in their cross-hairs.

[Greg Pfister]

> We know from IBM mainframes, which have been
> virtualised for over twenty years, that a server utilisation in a
> fully virtualised environment can be around 40%.

Back when I worked for IBM -- nearly 5 years ago now -- the conventional wisdom that I heard regularly was that it was not uncommon to see mainframes chugging along day in, day out at over 80% utilization.

I can't vouch for that directly, as I never saw it in action, myself. But that was the conventional wisdom then, and I doubt the number has fallen since then.

This, of course, just makes your argument even stronger. One could go take a look at the licensing used by Oracle and others on mainframes, to see how they don't exactly lose their shirts on it. Unfortunately, it'll probably give people who are used to Win & Lin licensing a heart attack.

Greg Pfister

http://perilsofparallel.blogspot.com/

[wayne pauley]

 
Honestly most of what I've seen outside of AWS is subscription based licensing. This is not on-demand by any stretch of the imagination - not to pick on anyone but take a look at the terms of service for many of the providers out there today. By forcing subscriptions with commitments at 1 or more years - the license cost is being amortized (albeit at scale) by the consumer.
 
At some level the problem is that some end user services aren't served well without some form of identity persistence and this creates a problem in terms of a "$0" approach when a service isn't used for a while.


Wayne Pauley
www.linkedin.com/in/waynepauley
www.privately-exposed.com (blog)
www.twitter.com/wpauley  

[Frank]

There is an ecosystem for oracle's fork?

> --
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[Juan J.]

On Fri, 2011-03-18 at 09:43 +0800, Frank wrote:
> There is an ecosystem for oracle's fork?

Good question.

According to their page [1], they claim to offer an special Linux kernel
with "extreme performance, advanced scalability and reliability", which
is based in Red Hat kernel (Oracle is offering 2.6.32, that is the same
that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 is shipping).

Before they acquired Sun, I believe their Oracle Linux was the preferred
option to get both OS and DB support from the same vendor (I've seen
this in different contracts in Spanish government).

Now is different, of course (Oracle DB and Solaris IS the platform), but
still I would say it's interesting for Oracle because they both offer an
alternative to customers that don't like Solaris and at the same time
they fight Red Hat in the Linux market.

So yes, I would say there's a market for Oracle's fork (more precisely
Oracle's support), and I think Red Hat's strategy change regarding the
kernel source supports that idea.

Regards,

Juanjo

[1] http://www.oracle.com/us/technologies/linux/index.html

--
Juan J. Martinez

[F. Feldmann]

Not sure I follow your logic. Ecosystem means other people are
innovating with one and joining in on both creation and monetization
ideally as well.

-ISV's
-IHV's
-chipmakers
-SI's

Everyone benefits basically. I've yet to see that, takes years of
mutual trust and respect to develop and sustain that. It is a fork
btw, no question about. How can it be the same yet better?

I'm sure there is an audience for cheaper stuff but that's not an
ecosystem nor is it a sustainable business model.

--
F. Feldmann

[Juan J.]

On Fri, 2011-03-18 at 23:22 +0800, F. Feldmann wrote:
> [...]

> Everyone benefits basically. I've yet to see that, takes years of
> mutual trust and respect to develop and sustain that. It is a fork
> btw, no question about. How can it be the same yet better?

Oh, thanks for the clarification.

You're right. Oracle is a free rider in this case, basically using the
open source code Red Hat releases without contributing back (although
they contributed some interesting stuff in the past to the Linux
community).

Anyway, I can't confirm that the change in Red Hat Enterprise Linux
kernel packaging is just because of Oracle Linux; but it makes sense.

Regards,

Juanjo

[Sassa]

I am not sure Red Hat is the target. Is the "unbreakable Linux" used
outside the context of Oracle products?

Microsoft owns the entire stack from OS to DB. IBM owns the entire
stack from OS to DB. Oracle didn't own OS until they decided to work
on "unbreakable Linux".


Sassa

On Mar 18, 8:39 am, "Juan J." Martínez <j...@memset.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 2011-03-18 at 09:43 +0800, Frank wrote:
> > There is an ecosystem for oracle's fork?
>
> Good question.
>
> According to their page [1], they claim to offer an special Linux kernel
> with "extreme performance, advanced scalability and reliability", which
> is based in Red Hat kernel (Oracle is offering 2.6.32, that is the same
> that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 is shipping).
>
> Before they acquired Sun, I believe their Oracle Linux was the preferred
> option to get both OS and DB support from the same vendor (I've seen
> this in different contracts in Spanish government).
>
> Now is different, of course (Oracle DB and Solaris IS the platform), but
> still I would say it's interesting for Oracle because they both offer an
> alternative to customers that don't like Solaris and at the same time
> they fight Red Hat in the Linux market.
>
> So yes, I would say there's a market for Oracle's fork (more precisely
> Oracle's support), and I think Red Hat's strategy change regarding the
> kernel source supports that idea.
>
> Regards,
>
> Juanjo
>
> [1]http://www.oracle.com/us/technologies/linux/index.html
>

> > On Mar 17, 2011, at 16:14, "Juan J." Martínez <j...@memset.com> wrote:
>
> > > On Wed, 2011-03-16 at 16:59 -0700, daniel@dumdan wrote:
> > >> [..]
> > >> On top of that, the recent "row" over the way Red Hat is distributing
> > >> kernel patches (for RHEL 6) doesn't inspire much confidence in their
> > >> ability to manage properly their own Linux "ecosystem", either.
>
> > > Context: Daniel is talking about a recent change in Red Hat about the
> > > way they provide kernel patches for their open source operative system.
> > > Previously, RHEL 5 provided the vanilla kernel and a set of patches, now
> > > with RHEL 6 they are providing the source already patched.
>
> > > This will cause trouble for Oracle, because their "Unbreakable
> > > Enterprise Linux Kernel" it's based in RHEL kernel, and now they don't
> > > have a easy way to review the patches Red Hat applies to the kernel.
>
> > > So Daniel is talking about Oracle ecosystem, and I agree with him.
>
> > > Cheers,
>
> > > Juanjo
>
> > > --
> > > Juan J. Martínez
> > > Development, MEMSET
>

> > > mail: j...@memset.com

> > > web:http://www.memset.com/
>
> > > Memset Ltd., registration number 4504980. 25 Frederick Sanger Road, Guildford, Surrey, GU2 7YD, UK.
>
> > > --
> > > ~~~~~

> > > 3rd Annual Cloud Slam 2011 Conference * April 18-22, 2011 * Mountain View, CA *http://cloudslam.org

> > > UP 2010 Conference:http://www.up-con.com
> > > Posting guidelines:http://bit.ly/bL3u3v
> > > Follow us on Twitter @cloudcomp_group

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> > > -http://www.up-con.com/register
> > > -http://cloudslam09.com/content/registration-5.html 
> > > -http://cloudslam10.com/content/registration

>
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> --
> Juan J. Martinez
> Development, MEMSET
>

> mail: j...@memset.com