Reduce licensing costs - disable cores?

From: Robert Laverty <Robert.Laverty_at_MolinaHealthCare.Com>
Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2012 07:19:09 -0700
Message-ID: <2500EFA954A6424E9B188BFDCD37EBF1010368AFA46F_at_CORPMAIL.molina.mhc>



We are planning a hardware refresh and management wants to move to Oracle T4-2 servers. These come with two 8-core CPUs, which breaks down to 8 "processors" for Oracle licensing (11gR2 EE). We're currently licensed for 6 processors on these boxes. Our application is all I/O and seldom exceeds 25% CPU.

I have two questions:
Has anyone used psradm to disable cores in Solaris to reduce licensing costs? Oracle's software sales guys claim that they don't know of any way to shut off cores. There was a similar post here last April, but I didn't see an answer. We want to keep it simple and avoid VM partitioning.

Is a server more reliable with two CPUs than one? Our admin insists that the redundancy is important, but I'm too skeptical to accept the premise that Solaris/Oracle will survive a catastrophic CPU failure. We're running a simple dedicated server with remote hot backup - no RAC.

Bob Laverty



Bob Laverty
NJ MMS SenIORS Team Lead

       1.609.588.6273 29.6273
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Received on Tue Mar 20 2012 - 09:19:09 CDT

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