Oracle Licensing References

Perhaps, you are also one of like me, difficult to understand about Oracle Licensing strategy with respect to CPU and Cores.

You will need to know about two types for a processor based licensing,

1) Is your host/server is non-virtual based
The Processor license for the Oracle Enterprise Edition is based on the number of physical cores in the processors installed in the device. The number of licenses required for a physical server is the number of cores multiplied by a factor tied to the processor type. Oracle publishes a core factor table here that is maintained over time. For instance, a server with 2 Intel Xeon E5620 processors, each of them having 4 cores will require (8 cores) * (.50 core factor) = 4 licenses.

2) Is your host/server based on Virtual servers

Two major types of partitioning technologies have been identified by Oracle: hard partitioning that physically segments a server such as Solaris Containers, vPar, nPar, etc. Each partition acts as a physically independent, self-contained server with physical resources (CPU, memory…) allocated exclusively to it. Oracle only requires purchasing licenses for the hard partitions where an Oracle database is installed and/or running: only processors allocated to these partitions will be considered in the license calculation. The list of the supported hard partitioning technologies is published by Oracle here. Soft partitioning is a technology where an operating system limits the number of resources allocated to each partition. Solutions such as AIX Workload Manager, Microsoft Hyper-V or VMware ESX belong to that category and are not recognized by Oracle for licensing purposes. Installing an Oracle instance on a single virtual machine in these environments requires licensing all physical processor-cores on the host supporting it.

In the example shown above, if the virtual machines are hard partitions, the number of Oracle processor licenses required would be: 2 (virtual cores) x 0.5 = 1

If the virtual machines are soft partitions (e.g. VMware ESX), the number of Oracle processor licenses required would be: 2 (processors) x 4 (cores/processor) x 0.5 (Core factor) = 4

-Thanks
Hope this helps.