What Constitutes Use of the RAC Option by Oracle Licensing?

aknoll

I have posed this question before but have never really gotten a clear answer.  Is it possible to "back down" from a RAC w/ ASM installation to the point where Oracle Licensing would not consider that the RAC option was being used?

We are being questioned by management about what it would take to drop the RAC option (most importantly the price tag associated with it) from our RAC clusters.

We have already dropped all non-primary nodes in each cluster to get down to one node/instance. 

We would prefer, of course, to get to where we need to be with the least amount of work.

I have seen discussions on various sites that state that all that is required is to re-link the rac binaries with the RAC option disabled.

We would prefer to still leverage the current ASM diskgroups/datafiles.

Any insight or experiences regarding this would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Alex

Dude!

You may never get a valid answer to a licensing and quote question asking in a public forum.

SPA09

Hi,

call your Oracle Sales to answer these kind questions.

We can't help here in the forum

regards

Dude!

My personal opinion, a defunct RAC cluster does not break the licensing requirements. Have you considered converting the RAC database to standalone or single instance? There's plenty of info about it on the web. Here's an older post you may find useful: Convert RAC with ASM to single instance.

aknoll

Thanks for the feedback.  Yes, I have looked at the post you mentioned but was curious if Oracle Licensing would be satisfied by simply flipping a value and re-linking the current binaries. 

Guess I am looking to leverage any of the current installation if possible without having to lay down additional binaries, etc..

BPeaslandDBA

I've never been in this situation, but I would think that if you could prove at one point you were licensed for it, but are no longer using it, the *should* accept that. That being said, you'll be dealing with Oracle auditors...So I'd probably take a more cautious route and create a new database and Data Pump or TTS the data over to it so that it doesn't show RAC as ever being used.

You could always ask Oracle License Management Services for their take on it.

Cheers,

Brian

aknoll

Thanks Brian,

I had planned all along to discuss with OLM Services, but was just interested in gathering information to see what was possible.  Trying to "get to the right point" without having to run around the earth and back, ha...

- Alex