Hi Jim
Thanks for sharing your experience on oracle licencing . It would be nice to further discuss on licensing topic which will help others to get confident on licensing term.
As per oracle doc on site
" Oracle recognizes capped Oracle Solaris Zones as licensable entities called hard partitions. There are several ways to implement CPU hard partitioning to comply with Oracle Database licensing policies (see the paper "Hard Partitioning With Oracle Solaris Zones"), including the following:
- Using the capped-cpu property for the zone configuration command (zonecfg)
- Using the dedicated-cpu property for zonecfg
- Using a resource pool with assigned hardware threads (vCPUs) and assigning the pool to a zone (as in the example here)"
Out of above three process, it is recommended to configure a processor set procedure.
As from a performance point of view, allocating a full core to each database instance helps to optimize database performance because it gives database processes exclusive access to the pipelines, cache, and other resources within an individual core.
one more oracle site links says
"the Oracle licensing document referenced above states that the
acceptable way to configure Oracle Solaris Zones is using “capped
Zones/Containers only"
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/se...ng-2347187.pdf