Ok, I went out and did some Oracle licensing research just to confirm that I have been saying the right things when it comes to Oracle and virtualization. I am glad I did because technically I haven’t been wrong to date, but, there are other considerations that I was not taking into account and they are important. I have taken my research and condensed it into this email. If you already know this stuff ignore this email, however, I know there are several of you that explain the licensing model the same way I have been doing in the past.

Two things to determine first: hard or soft partitioning and what version- standard or enterprise.

Ok, with standard, it will always be a simple proc count. Here are a couple examples:

Hard Provisioning Examples Standard Edition:

-          32 processor mainframe with no CPU restrictions. (You would need 32 licenses)

-          16 processor mainframe provisioned so that only 4 are available to Oracle. (You would need 4 licenses)

Soft Provisioning Examples Standard Edition:

-          A single 2 processor VMWare host server. (You would need 2 licenses)

-          Three 2 processor VMWare host servers. (You would need 6 licenses. Even though an Oracle VM would be running on a single 2 proc host at any one time, Oracle still makes you license the procs in the whole cluster)

Enterprise Edition throws an additional calculation into the licensing model. The hard/soft provisioning rules still apply, but, now there must be a CORE count, not just a processor count. The following number is achieved by using a formula (Intel/AMD chips only):

#procs x #cores x .50 = license count

Hard Provisioning Examples Enterprise Edition:

-          12 four core procs without CPU restrictions. (12 x 4 x .50 = 24 licenses)

-          16 four core procs with only 6 procs available to Oracle. (6 x 4 x .50 = 12 licenses)

Soft Provisioning Examples Enterprise Edition:

-          A single two processor, quad core VMWare host server. (2 x 4 x .50 = 4 licenses)

-          4 two processor, quad core VMWare host servers. (8 x 4 x .50 = 16 licenses)