Hi everybody!
being a DBA in a company with a relatively small stack of oracle licenses I've got some future concerns -challenges if you like- regarding my license set and CPU cores.
We're running on intel quadcore CPU's and own 10 CPU licences.
Taking the 0.5 core factor into account we have the right to license 20 CPU cores, so we've got 5 machines with a quadcore.
Now I see future developments in the CPU world: 8-core is pretty standard nowadays and in a couple of years I expect the 12/16 core CPU's to be common good and the 4-core CPU's to be end of life.
This has some effect on licences:
assume 8-core CPU's will only available in a couple of years.
With a hardware refresh I could buy 2 CPU's and have 4 CPU licenses unused.. ( 10 licences allows 20 cores vs 16 cores on 2 8-core processors).
One of the options is to buy 2 CPU licences so I have 12 in total, allowing me to use 24 cores = 3 CPU's with 8 cores.
A side effect is, that I am less flexible in spreading my licenses across multiple servers to separate my environment into a production and test environment on a hardware level, or to separate options like spatial.
You'd have to buy extra licenses to cover all the CPU cores in a machine.
I am familiar with the oracle documents regarding CPU core factor table and the use of virtualisation with hard- and soft CPU partitioning.
Just wondering: what will the future bring me? I foresee extra licence costs due to CPU's having more cores.
Any thoughts on this subject? Is there a statement from oracle how they deal with this?
.R