ODA and CPU license

ODA and CPU license

Last week, I was working on a customer with ODA x4-2 which we found 5 CPU licenses are sold for EE deployment. My first reaction was on how to put 5 CPU license (10 cores) in ODA x4-2. As you may know, the multiplier of 4 cores can be activated in X3-2 and above and multiplier of 2 in ODA v1. In this post, I am trying to explain what is the minimum core requirement for various ODA server with virtualized and non-virtualized deployment.

We all know that "pay as grow" is one of the great feature of Oracle Database Appliance. In other words, you could start with as minimum core as possible and then scale up.
However, due to CPU specification on various ODA version, there is some limitation in regards to minimum number of cores which could be setup as it is shown in below :

Min license
	V1	X3-2,3,4
EE	2x0.5=1	4x0.5=2	10 day rule
RACOne	2x0.5=1	4x0.5=2	10 day rule
RAC	2x2x0.5=2	2x4x0.5=4
EE -VM	2x0.5=1	2x0.5=1	10 day rule
RACOne-VM	2x0.5=1	2x0.5=1	10 day rule
RAC - VM	2x2x0.5=2	2x2x0.5=2

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Couple notes :

• 10 day rule is to have all instances in EE or RAC1 only on one ODA node and without paying license to be allowed to flip over to the second node in case the first node is not available only for 10 days per calendar year.
• Since ODA platform is x86, the contributing factor is 0.5. This is where you can see all multiplier of 0.5 in the table.
• On ODA x3-2 and above odd number of CPU can not be setup unless ODA is setup as virtualized platform.
• Virtualization provides more flexibility in terms of lowering the number of the required CPU specially for EE or RAC1. If you are dealing with small customer, you may end up to go virtualized even ODA is purposed only for database deployment.

Hope this post clarifies some confusion.