It is a bane to a business owner’s existence. You decide to get Linux and add in some virtual machines. Before you know it, you are staring at numbers, plans, prices and specifications and you simply cannot make head or tails out it.
To say that things can get complicated can be a very big understatement. This is especially true if you are looking at more than four sockets for larger servers.
Luckily for Oracle customers, the company’s pricing for Oracle Linux and Oracle VM are pretty straight-forward, simple and easy to understand.
First off, Oracle’s pricing is freely available to the public at this page: //www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/els-pricelist-070592.pdf
This price list is for those who are not using Oracle x86 servers. If you get Oracle x86 servers, the money you pay for it would include free use of Oracle VM, Oracle Solaris and Oracle Linux. The number of virtual machines you run on the server will not matter!
Pricing Oracle VM
Support costs will cost $599 per server annually if you get Oracle VM Premier Limited, which covers servers with up to 2 sockets. If you have more than 2 sockets, you would need to get Oracle VM Premier at $1199 per server.
Getting either Oracle VM Premier or Oracle VM Premier Limited support, you can also use the virtualization management pack in Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control or Oracle VM Manager included for the yearly subscription. Plus, you have round-the-clock support, updates, and bug fixes, and get the latest releases. Further, you get dynamic resource scheduling, high availability, live migrate, dynamic power management and other options included in the support price.
Pricing for Oracle Linux
If you are planning to get support subscriptions for Oracle Linux, remember that each subscription is for each physical server. Even if you run Oracle Linux on Oracle VM, Hyper-V or VMWare, you only need to pay one subscription for each system you have. Oracle does not charge based on the number of guests!
There are five different support levels you could get for Oracle Linux:
- Oracle Linux Network Support gives you an unlimited number of sockets per server for only $119 per server a year. This does not give you access to support services, but it does allow you to use the Unbreakable Linux Network.
- Oracle Linux Basic Limited Support gives you round-the-clock support services for up to 2 socket servers for only $499 a year for each server. Basic Limited includes the Oracle Cluster File System version 2 as a shared disk file system.
- Oracle Linux Basic Support is similar to Basic Limited but provides support for more than 2 socket server at $1199 a year for each server.
- Oracle Linux Premier Limited Support is for servers with up to 2 sockets at only $1399 a year for every server you have. It offers support for XFS file system, Oracle Lifetime support, Ksplice updates, and backporting of patches. Oracle Linux Premier Support is similar to Premier Limited but this one offers supports for servers with more than two socket at $2299 per server.
All subscription levels include:
- 24×7 support
- access to Unbreakable Linux Network
- access to the Oracle Support portal
- full indemnification for Oracle Linux
- access to Oracle Clusterware for Linux HA
- access to Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud control for managing Linux OS
You can also download, install and use Oracle Linux without any support subscription.
Photo courtesy of 401(K) 2013.
