This risks of containerising JDE

To container or not container?

We've looked into containerising JDE for a long time.  We've had it running in the lab, we've done extensive performance testing too...  We have struggled to make the leap when it comes to our customers production environments.  The technology should be supported IMHO, but oracle do not support it.  They do not test any of their updates or patches on a containerised implementation.  So would I risk my customers uptime when I cannot get unequivocal support from my primary vendor (oracle), probably not!

Also, you might want to critically evaluate your weblogic licencing, as that can get expensive when deploying on the wrong cloud services.

Problem 1: WebLogic licences

1. Oracle Licensing Model for WebLogic

Oracle WebLogic is typically licensed in one of two ways:

• Per Processor (CPU) License – based on the number of Oracle-licensed processor cores

• Named User Plus (NUP) – based on the number of users, with minimums tied to processor count

When containerising, Per Processor is the model most affected.

---

How CPU Count is Calculated in Containers

Oracle’s policy is clear: Oracle does not recognise container limits as a licensing boundary unless you're using an Oracle-approved hard partitioning technology.

This means:

If you deploy WebLogic inside Docker or Kubernetes, Oracle may count all physical CPU cores on the host unless you use a licensing-compliant method to restrict it.

Example:

• You run WebLogic in a container limited to 2 vCPUs on a VM with 64 cores.

• Oracle may still require you to license all 64 cores, unless you use an approved virtualisation technology (like Oracle VM or physical partitioning on Oracle SPARC hardware).

---

Oracle’s Stand on Virtualisation and Containers

Oracle’s Partitioning Policy document explicitly states:

"Oracle does not recognise soft partitioning (e.g., cgroups, Docker limits, Kubernetes node selectors) as a means to limit licensing requirements."

So:

• Docker/K8s CPU limits do not restrict licensing scope

• Hard partitioning (e.g., Oracle LDOMs, IBM PowerVM) is required to reduce licensable CPU

Question	Answer
Can you containerise WebLogic?	Yes, technically, but licensing must be handled carefully.
How is CPU count calculated?	Oracle counts all cores on the host unless hard-partitioned using approved methods.
What are the risks?	Over-licensing or non-compliance in audit scenarios.
Best practices?	Use OCI, or hard partitioned environments. Avoid relying on Docker/K8s limits alone.

If you do not licence WLS with technology foundation (and many customers do not), then you cannot use any public k8 or docker services, as their soft partitioning is not recognised by oracle.  This is putting you at risk in a licence audit.

Given the above, you pretty much need to run docker or k8 on a dedicated host, which is going to depreciate the availability gains of containers.

Problem 2: You are running an unsupported architecture

I think the risks are more apparent with the latest features,  especially for their more technical components of no downtime package deployments, filesystem integrations and file naming techniques and a few other troublesome edge cases that need additional configuration and support.  I'd do it for my customers if they did not think support was important (they stopped paying maintenance for example).

E1: OCI: Support Statement for Running Containerized JDE on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (Doc ID 2421088.1)

... While the product development team will be available to actively collaborate with your “containerization of JD Edwards” project, we make no commitments right now that any issue that is specific to containerized deployment will be addressed under standard support model. In other words, if the issue cannot be replicated in a non-containerized environment, the product development team may or may not provide a fix for that...