Attn Oracle DBAs

[vmNewb35]

We are getting ready (or at least entertaining the idea of) to switch to Oracle 11g on RHEL. We understand that this is a very successful configuration in the IT world currently. We are wanting to run this on ESX and will thus be adding additional licensed copies to our environment should this be the final direction.

1. Is this a good fit for VMWare (i.e. are you folks doing it currently?)

2. We will be running EPM (PeopleSoft) on this and we understand that it is fairly intensive model building and data warehousing.

3. We have been told that it will require major cpu and ram but, like everything else, this is generally not the case once you put it on VMWare as you end up seeing how little of it gets used.

I would appreciate any and all answers/thoughts. We will also be looking at professional help for this implementation should we go down this path so any suggestions you have along these lines would be appreciated too.

Thanks!

[hicksj]

If you can't hard partition (a la LPARs, etc.) you must pay for the total number of CPUs on the box. But if you have 16 CPUs and you cut an LPAR for 8 and run Oracle solely for this partition then you only pay an 8-way license.

Sounds like if you go VMWare with Oracle, you will pay for the number of CPUs you build into the VM and then license that way. And if you end up needing more, then you will pay additional costs as you grow.

This is not how I understood Oracle's take, specific to VMware. Technically, you cannot gaurentee that you're running on 8 specific processors (out of 16). The VM load is spread around, so even with 8 vSMP processors, you're taking advantage of 16 processors (but only up to 8 at a time). Therefore you MUST license for 16 processors (or whatever Oracle's licensing multiplier of the week is for multi-core CPUs).

With "named" licenses, that isn't a problem.

Note: I hope what I understood above is completely wrong. Someone _please _prove me wrong with something official from Oracle.

[randy_castle]

Here is a link describing how to do "hard partitioning using OracleVM (xen?)

I don't see the difference between this and scheduling affinity under VMWare ESX (Virtual Machine Properties/Resource Tab/Advanced CPU).

Interestingly, I see this option when using VMware Infrastructure Client direct to the Virtual Server but NOT when I connect to Virtual Infrastructure???

Randy

[ymcp]

I know this is an old discussion, but feel that I should point out that the following statement is not entirely correct:

With "named" licenses, that isn't a problem.

The issue here is that Oracle specify a certain minimum number of named users per CPU. With Enterprise Edition the current minimum is 25 users per CPU, so a server with 16 CPUs must be licensed for a minimum of 400 users. The current list price for that is around $200,000 which could well be a problem!

[ymcp]

Oops.