Oracle VM Server-- Licensing & Cpu pinning

This is an important info for you, especially if you want to decrease your license costs using Oracle Vm Server's Capacity on Demand feature.

We see the Oracle VM Server utilized for the database environments, as well as for the application server environments and we see the Cpu configurations for the guest machines are properly aligned with the licenses on hand.

However; there is one more thing that should be configured for the capacity-on-demand feature to work. I mean it is required in order to make Oracle accept the license fee which is decreased by using the capacity-on-demand feature.

That is the Cpu pinning.

What CPU pinning does is basically, assigning physical CPUs to a VM.

This is also called hard partitioning, as it is used for binding a virtual machine CPU to a physical CPU or core, and preventing it from running on other physical cores than the ones specified. This is done for Oracle CPU licensing purposes, since Oracle VM is licensed on a per-CPU basis.

So, unless you do this, you may have to pay the licenses for all the cores that you have on your physical server.

Implementing this kind of a configuration is very easy though..

You can check the Oracle VM Server documentation for the detailed steps.