What is Oracle BYOL?

What is Oracle BYOL ?

• Oracle BYOL stands for Oracle ‘Bring Your Own Licenses’ to the cloud.
• Oracle BYOL allows our customers to apply licenses they currently own for on-premises software to their usage on the cloud.
• Oracle allows BYOL licenses to be applied on
  • Third Party Clouds. The following are allowed, known as Approved Vendors or  Authorized Cloud Environments:
    • AWS
    • Azure
    • Google

• Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)
  • PaaS
  • IaaS
• Customers bring their on-premises license entitlement and get license support via their existing on-premises support contract.

What are the rules for applying Oracle BYOL licenses to Approved Cloud Vendors?

When licensing Oracle software in an approved cloud environment, the following guidelines apply:

Processor Licensing in Cloud:

• Virtual Processor (vCPU) Equivalence:
  • Two vCPUs are equivalent to one Oracle Processor license if multi-threading is enabled.
  • One vCPU is equivalent to one Oracle Processor license if multi-threading is not enabled.
• Oracle Processor Core Factor Table: The Oracle Processor Core Factor Table does not apply in cloud environments.
• Example: To license Oracle Database Enterprise Edition on a single instance with four vCPUs and multi-threading enabled, two Oracle Processor licenses would be required.

Standard Edition Licensing in Cloud:

• Instance Size:
  • Instances with four or fewer vCPUs are counted as one socket (equivalent to one Oracle Processor license).
  • Instances with more than four vCPUs are rounded up to the nearest multiple of four and counted accordingly.
• Maximum Instance Size:
  • Oracle Database Standard Edition: 16 vCPUs
  • Oracle Standard Edition One and Standard Edition 2: 8 vCPUs
• Named User Plus (NUP) Licensing:
  • A minimum of 10 NUP licenses is required for every 8 vCPUs when licensing Database Standard Edition 2 by NUP.

Unlimited License Agreements (ULAs):

Licenses acquired under ULAs can be used in approved cloud environments but cannot be included in the certification process at the end of the ULA term.

Core Factor Table Not Applicable

When counting Oracle Processor license requirements in Authorized Cloud Environments, the Oracle Processor Core Factor Table is not applicable.

Support

Oracle BYOL to OCI is available only if you have supported licenses on-premise.

What are the rules for applying Oracle BYOL licenses to OCI?

Quick Rules

• One Oracle Processor License maps to two OCPUs.
• One OCPU is equal to one vCPU
• Customers bring their on-premises license entitlement and get license support via their existing on-premises support contract.
• Customers are allowed to use licenses on-premise for 100 days if they are migrating to OCI
• BYOL to PaaS allows usage of Diagnostic Pack & Tuning Pack without its equivalent on-premise license.

Detailed Rules

• The detailed rules are in the document titled Oracle PaaS and IaaS Universal Credits Service Descriptions. It is available here
• There is a simplified understanding in this FAQ here

What is good for customers in Oracle BYOL?

• BYOL is useful for customers who have a large number of perpetual licenses.
• BYOL is useful for customers who want to continue with Oracle support.
• BYOL on Third Party Clouds can be used even without support. This will be useful for customers who might be looking to migrate other databases.

Read more about ULA Certification here