Quoting from IT Week:
Oracle has admitted it is “too complicated” to develop a licensing model that accounts for software running on virtual servers, despite the growing adoption of virtualised environments at many large enterprises.
Speaking yesterday, Oracle president Charles Phillips said that customers remained happy with Oracle’s current licensing model, which is predominantly based on physical machines running the software.
“We license by the physical partition as there is no way we can know what [customers] are doing with [the machine],” Phillips said. “It is too complicated to do it any other way.”
…
Last year, Oracle modified its licensing to account for rising adoption of multicore chips, but Phillips suggested changes to deliver “virtualisation pricing” are unlikely…
Read the whole article at source.
At today Oracle is one of the major ISVs not recognizing virtualization technologies and not adjusting its offering accordingly.
Tents of roseate forecasts issued by top research analysis firms, VMware successful IPO and XenSource acquisition by Citrix don’t seem to change this state of facts.
And customers definitively don’t remain happy with current licensing model, as Oracle President reports, talking more about a nightmare.
virtualization.info recognizes virtualization-unfriendly licensing scheme as one of top issue negatively affecting virtualization adoption, and lists it at second place in Virtualization Industry Challenges report.