Hi
I'm very confused (and so are most people I ask) about Oracle's licensing when it comes to multi-cored, hyperthreaded CPUs. Maybe someone here can help me :-)
We have Oracle Database Enterprise Edition 10.2 installed on a Sun server running Redhat Linux.
The Sun server has 1 physical quad core processor installed. Hyperthreading is enabled, so from a server point-of-view we have 8 logical cores:
When I run 'top' in Linux, it will show:
Cpu0 : 0.0%us, 0.3%sy, 0.0%ni, 99.7%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Cpu1 : 0.0%us, 0.0%sy, 0.0%ni,100.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Cpu2 : 1.7%us, 0.3%sy, 0.0%ni, 63.1%id, 34.6%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.3%si, 0.0%st
Cpu3 : 5.0%us, 0.7%sy, 0.0%ni, 32.6%id, 61.5%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.3%si, 0.0%st
Cpu4 : 0.0%us, 0.0%sy, 0.0%ni,100.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Cpu5 : 0.0%us, 0.0%sy, 0.0%ni,100.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Cpu6 : 1.0%us, 0.0%sy, 0.0%ni, 99.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Cpu7 : 0.0%us, 0.0%sy, 0.0%ni, 99.7%id, 0.3%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
When I run SHOW PARAMETER CPU_COUNT from SQLPLUS, it shows me '8' - so the database counts logical cores.
I know that when you pay for CPU licenses, licensing is based on number of CPUs and a core is is regarded as 0.5 of a physical CPU.
My question: Does that refer to logical (in our case 8) or physical (in our case 4) cores...?
I have googled myself silly and also looked at Oracle's licensing documentation, but don't seem to find any reference to 'logical cores'. I'd like to hear from you from you if you are paying licenses for databases where you have hyperthreading enabled on multi-core processors.
Thanks,
Andreas