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20050516 Monday May 16, 2005

Oracle and Containers in Solaris 10

It's good to see changes in available technology reflected in how services are paid for by the people who pay my salary - the customer.

Check out the document on partitioning available here. It talks about how a Solaris 10 Container is considered a "hard partitioning" technology for Oracle licensing purposes.

So long as your Solaris 10 Container is tied to a resource pool limited to a number of CPUs which is less than the total number in the server, you only have to license for the number of CPUs which can be in the resource pool, not the whole server.

Since Containers are available on any server running Solaris 10, you don't need a system capable of being partitioned in hardware in order to take advantage of this feature.

( May 16 2005, 03:11:43 PM BST ) Permalink Comments [4]

Trackback URL: http://blogs.sun.com/peterparsons/entry/oracle_and_containers_in_solaris
Comments:

<p/> I don't think it needs to be a fixed number of CPUs. I believe that you must pay for a license for the maximum number of CPUs available to the partition. <p/> That's a bit of a nit-picking distinction, so I apologise, but it's important since it may well be the case that an administrator chooses to license a maximum number of CPUs (e.g. 8) but typically run a partition with fewer CPUs (e.g. 6). This would be to cover times of peak load when more CPUs were required to power the database. <p/> Now, if only Oracle would introduce a pricing mechanism which disregarded peak loading scenarios and was priced around average partition size rather than maximum.

Posted by Gary Pennington on May 16, 2005 at 03:55 PM BST #

Gary,

Not sure I should be commenting on Oracle's pricing mechanisms in general - that is a discussion between Oracle and their users.

Resource pools in Solaris 10 can be capped. The cap on the number of CPUs can be less than the total number of CPUs in the box. Thus, if you have an 8-way server, but you only ever want to use, say, a maximum of 4 CPUs for Oracle, by putting the Oracle instance inside a container which is tied to an appropriately configured resource pool, you only ever have to pay for a 4 CPU license.

The resource pool could be fixed at 4 CPUs or could be a dynamic pool with a maximum size of 4 CPUs.

Of course, if at some point later, you decide that this maximum needs to be upped to 6, you then need a 6 CPU license, just as if you had added 2 CPUs in to an existing 4-way server dedicated to Oracle.

The key thing is that 8-way box without hardware partitioning does not necessarily require an 8 CPU license when you are using Solaris 10 to run Oracle, only a license to cover the CPUs which are, or could be, used by Oracle. This was not the case for Solaris 9 and 8 where you would have had to license for all 8 CPUs regardless.

Pete.

Posted by Peter Parsons on May 16, 2005 at 04:46 PM BST #

I was trying to make the distinction between having a fixed number of CPUs in a partition (as you described in your original post, your re-wording now makes that clear and my comment redundant) and a maximum number of CPUs. To be explicit, I meant the distinction between: min=8,max=8 (fixed at 8) and min=1, max=8. (can fluctuate between 1 and 8) FWIW, Resource pools could be capped in Solaris 9 as well, but Oracle have chosen to treat them differently. BTW: I should declare my credentials here. I'm very familiar with how resource pools work in Solaris 9 and Solaris 10, since I did most of the implementation prior to leaving Sun. ;-)

Posted by Gary Pennington on May 16, 2005 at 05:38 PM BST #

Hi Gary / Peter, Any idea why Oracle considers the Resource Pool capping in S9 differently from S10. We have a real situation with us where we are trying to optimise on the Oracle DB licenses by using capped containers. However our application is certified to only run on Sol 9 and not on Sol 10. * Is there any recent update from Sun / Oracle about acceptance of S9 containers also as a valid capped container tech? Would appreciate if you could reply soon. Thanks in anticipation. Sridhar

Posted by Sridhar Bharadwaj on January 16, 2007 at 03:44 PM GMT #

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