Re: Reduce licensing costs - disable cores?

On Tue, Mar 20, 2012 at 07:19:09AM -0700, Robert Laverty wrote:
> 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.

AFAIK the only partitioning acceppted by Oracle is either LDOM-s or Solaris Containers (= Solaris zones + resource pools). We use the second one.

> 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.

If one CPU fails for sure you will have panic. But the server is going to boot and run with just one CPU - it is not a problem. We lost 4 CPU when motherboard failed (many yeasr ago) - but after a panic the server started and went ok.

Regards
Przemek (przemol)

>
> Bob Laverty
>
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