Experience of licencing Oracle DB's in IVM's

[cjb_1]

I am after your experiences of licensing oracle databases on Integrity virtual machines.
Specifically I am after an understanding on what is meant by 'capped partitions'.

For example. If I have a 2 (4 core) processor server (8 core in total) and I create an hpvm with 4 vCPU's can I get away with licensing 4 cores of Oracle DB (assuming no Oracle elsewhere on the host server).

My interpretation of the 'capped partitions' would be that I could assign 4 x 100% vCPU and not 8 x 50% to my guest.

Any real world issues/findings on this subject would be greatly appreciated.

Regards
Chris

[Duncan Edmonstone · Accepted solution]

Chris,

Oracle apply the term "capped" to pretty much all virtualisation technologies, whether it means anything in a specific context or not.

In the case of HPVMs, there really isn't any such thing as a "capped" partition, as you can't dynamically change the number of vCPUs in a HPVM anyway (beyond reducing the number of vCPUs after you have started the HPVM).

Otherwise your interpretation is correct - just look at the number of vCPUs you have in the HPVM guest, and that's the number of cores you need to consider for Oracle licensing. The one proviso here is you never need more licenses than you have cores in the HPVM host. So if you have 1 x 4-core HPVM guest in an 8-core HPVM host you need 4 cores worth of Oracle licenses, if you have 2 x 4-core HPVM guests in an 8-core HPVM host you need 8 cores worth of Oracle licenses, but if you have 3 x 4-core HPVM guests in an 8-core HPVM host you still only need 8 cores worth of Oracle licenses.

HTH

Duncan