oracle and vpar

[Bob Brown_1]

I heard from one of my hp reps that Oracle does NOT support running in a vpar. I find this hard to helieve. Can anyone shed any light on this?

We're looking to run oracle (probably 9i or 10g) on an 8400 with several vpars.

thanks!

-Bob

[Frederic Sevestre · Accepted solution]

Hi,

I never heard anything about such a restriction.
We have many databases on differents vpar and we never had any problem with the Oracle Support.

Regards,
Frederic

[Fred Ruffet]

I just come back from a 6 month project, installing many Oracle 9iR2 DBs on a Superdome (HP-UX 11i). It was supported. I had need of them and they solved my problem.

Regards,

Fred

[Bob Brown_1]

Any chance the issue is Oracle 10g? Maybe its not certified in vpar yet?

Or could this relate to oracle pricing...how do they price their s/w with dynamic vparing?

(switching cpu's in and out of a vpar running oracle)?

-Bob

[Chris Fitzpatrick]

Oracle is fully supported in both vpars and npars without question....

However, Oracle does not recognise vpars from a licensing perspective.

This is probably the source of your confusion.

Chris

[Thierry Poels_1]

hi,

we also have installed Oracle 9i in a vPar without issues.

regards,
Thierry.

[Alzhy]

We are running Oracle 9i R2 on rp8400 vPars. I believe Oracle also has support for PRM and PSETs (Procesor sets -- so that when you dynamically allocate CPU's from one vPar to another.. you do not violate your Oracle CPU licensing.

So there you go.. the HP rep probably was unaware that Oracle is already Processor Sets (PSET/WLM) friendly..

[Allan Umandap]

Hi Guys,

I need more clarifications on this issue. I recently installed 10g on HPUX 11.23 box. I have 8CPUs in my machine. I want to restrict 1CPU for 10g since i only want to buy 1CPU license. Is this possible?. I know you would say that vPar is an option, but in my case this is not possible. vPars are not yet supported in 11.23. So, guys how am i going to solve my problem.

Thanks..

[Han Pilmeyer]

This is an Oracle licensing issue, not a technical problem. So you would have to discuss this with Oracle. Recently Oracle has started to allow Oracle licenses to be allocated based on vPars.

You might be able to persuade Oracle to license you for one CPU now (restricted through for instance a processor set) and promise to migrate to some form of virtual partitions when those become available on Integrity servers next year.

[Peter McKenzie_1]

Reading the oracle documentation on this: http://www.oracle.com/corporate/pricing/partitioning.pdf it seems that vPars are now supported by Oracle. The older version of this same document had vPars (and PRM) in the unacceptable soft partitioning category but vPars are now mentioned in the acceptable hard partitioning category but PRM is still mentioned in the soft partitioning section.

Still the definition of hard partitioning does not match the definition of HP vPars even though Oracle does explicitly list vPars in the hard partitioning section.

- Peter

[Duncan Edmonstone]

Supported yes... good idea? that depends...

The thing about vPars is that any 'floating' processor (i.e. a processor that can be moved from one vPar to another) is unable to carry out any IO operations. This is due to the fact that the current version of HP-UX does not support migration of IO interrupts off a running processor. This functionality is coming to vPars some time next year, but as things stand, any floating processors will not do any IO for you.

What does this mean? Well what it means in practice is you *need* to benchmark your database performance both with and without floating processors to get a good feel for performance - could be your parcticular IO profile will not be impacted by this issue, or it could be it severely reduces your throughput - you MUST test before deploying in a vPar config.

Just my $0.02 worth

Duncan