RDBMS Licensing -- CPU / Core limits for Named User Plus licenses

As you may already know, Database licensing (Standard Edition 2 and Enterprise Edition) can be done in two ways.

1) Cpu based licensing. 2) NUP(Named user plus) based licensing.

I will not go in to the details about these licensing methods, because it is not my job or my interest.
However, I want to shed a light on a specific topic, which can be a little confusing.

Although the information that you will find below is on a specific licensing topic, it gives general information about database licensing, as well.

Note that, the information given below is about Enterprise Edition, as we mostly use Enterprise Edition (i.e Oracle EBS databases are Enterprise Edition).

The topic that I want to inform you about, is the CPU limits for Named User Plus licensing.

That is, although Named User Plus licensing is done on the basis of database user count, there is a limit for the Cpu/core as well.

In other words; you can't just buy 25 number of User Named Plus licenses and run your database on a server which has 24 CPU cores(enabled).
(Note that, the Enterprise Edition requires a minimum of 25 Named User Plus per Processor licenses or the total number of actual users, whichever is greater.)

Let's take a closer look at this;

The CPU based licensing for Oracle Database Enterprise Edition is actually done on core-basis.
We count the cores of our database server, then multiply this total physical core count with a core factor (0.5 for Intel CPUs) to calculate the needed CPU/processor licenses for our database environment.

This is also applicable for deriving maximum CPU count that we can have for X number of Named User Plus licenses.

Let's take a look at the following example to strengthen that I just explained.

Suppose you have 50 Named User Plus licenses and want to know the maximum Cpu/core count that you can have with these licenses.

50 user plus can support up to 2 Cpu/core licenses.
These 2 cores  are actually Oracle cores, which should be divided with the processor core factor for deriving the maximum cpu core counts that we can have. (cpu core factor for intel is 0.5)

So, 2  / 0.5 = 4 cpu cores.. Thus, we can say that we can have 4 cores enabled, if we have 50 named user plus licenses.

For instance; if we have 50 named user plus licenses and if we have  an ODA X6-2S , then we should enable only 4 core of it.

Similarly, if we want to enable all the cores of ODA X6-2S ( 10 cores total), then we need to do the following calucataion to calculate the extra licenses that we will need->

10-4=6 -> 6* 0.5 = 3 extra core licenses or 3*25 = 75 extra Named User plus licenses.

Note that, all fractions of a number are to be rounded up to the next whole number. For instance, if we get 1.5 as the result of these calculation, we need to round it up to 2.

References:

http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/databaselicensing-070584.pdf

Database Licensing - Oracle

Product Minimums for Named User Plus licenses (where the minimums are per processor) are calculated after the number of processors to be licensed is determined, using the "PROCESSOR DEFINITION".

PROCESSOR DEFINITION:

The number of required licenses shall be determined by multiplying the total number of cores of the processor by a core processor licensing factor specified on the Oracle Processor Core Factor Table.

I wrote this article, because DBAs and Apps DBAs should know these things. At least we as DBAs and Apps DBAs should have some idea about these things; because they are frequently asked by the customers (this is for DBA consultants) and because we need to keep our companies in the safe side. (this is for all the DBAs)

Lastly, sharing the processor core factor table...
Processor Core Factor table (current one -- may be updated in the future)