Microsoft Releases Oracle On Azure Cloud Details

With little fanfare software giant Microsoft has released details on licence-included Oracle VMs for its Windows Azure platform.

The move comes months after the companies announced a strategic partnership that brings Oracle’s enterprise software to Microsoft’s cloud.

Oracle Partnership

Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s former cloud chief and now the software giant’s new CEO, announced the team-up, which brought the big competitors together, last summer. “As part of this partnership, Oracle will certify and support Oracle software on Windows Server Hyper-V and Windows Azure,” he said in a 24 June statement.

Cloud computing’s impact on the IT market space can turn rivals into allies. The enterprise cloud era “requires companies to rethink what they build, to rethink how they operate and to rethink whom they partner with,” said Nadella.

The partnership would usher in an era of “license mobility” spanning Windows-based private and public clouds. Nadella added that “customers who have long enjoyed the ability to run Oracle software on Windows Server can run that same software on Windows Server Hyper-V or in Windows Azure and take advantage of our enterprise-grade virtualisation platform and public cloud.”

A pricing page, spotted by ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley, explains that the company plans to make licence-included Oracle virtual machines (VMs) generally available 12 March, effectively spelling the end of the preview. “Licence-included Oracle VMs are Windows Server VMs made available in the Windows Azure Gallery in which Oracle software has been preinstalled,” explained Microsoft.

Currently, Microsoft is only charging for the Windows Server VMs that Oracle runs on, said the company, not Oracle itself. The company’s bring-your-own-license (BYOL) Oracle VM offerings have been officially available since September.

Licence Costings

The Oracle Software tab on the Windows Azure Virtual Machines page details how much the company plans to charge for the service. “Beginning 12 March, we will charge for the Oracle software running in license-included Oracle VMs in addition to our charge for the Windows Server VMs in which the Oracle software runs.”

Microsoft plans to charge hourly rates, which will be billed according to the total number of minutes that license-included Oracle VMs run during each billing cycle, said the company. Prices range from $0.08 (£0.05) per hour for Java Standard Edition (SE) on one virtual core to $12.63 (£7.59) per hour for Oracle Database Enterprise Edition (EE).

In typical Microsoft fashion, the company is giving early birds a price break. “Microsoft officials also noted there will be a 20 percent to 32 percent discount under six- or 12-month commitment plans available to customers for a limited time (12 March to 30 June) for Oracle software on Azure,” noted Foley in her report.

Naturally, Oracle isn’t hitching its wagon to just one cloud. The company cemented a similar partnership with Amazon in 2010 and floated its own Public Cloud in June 2012.

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Originally published on eWeek.