I was off yesterday and came in this morning anticipating lots of feedback
on this but now I'm surprised by the lack of response from all you seasoned
gurus. :-) I guess this is a very new thing and you aren't aware of it yet.
Anyway, here's what I've garnered so far:
There was a discussion on slashdot where one guy said Oracle was wanting to
charge licenses on the virtual CPU's instead of the actual number of
physical CPU's. Then someone else said he had checked with Oracle for a
definitive answer BEFORE implementing it because it was a make or break deal
for him. He said Oracle was only going to charge for actual physical CPU's
and not the virtual hyperthreaded CPU's so he went ahead with his
implementation and says he got a 30% performance boost. Not the same
performance boost as would be expected from adding real CPU's but
significant nonetheless. He said it was a 30% "free" boost because he didn't
have to buy anything; all he had to do was reconfigure Linux. In another
discussion on the SUSE/Oracle list it was stated that the performance boost
is about 20% of what you would expect from adding a real processor and that
Oracle once again said the license charge would be by virtual processor and
not the actual number of CPU's in the server. It was also stated that the
max number of processors for the standard edition is 4 as decreed by his
Oracle highness so with hyperthreading you could only have 2 real CPU's.
Finally, I only got 3 hits on Metalink where Oracle support drones said you
didn't have to do anything Oracle-wise to adjust for doubling the number of
O/S visible CPU's. They did not respond to init.ora tuning questions and
they refered us to our Oracle sales drones for licensing questions as they
were clueless in Seatle.
As usual there is controversy regarding Oracle's license confusion. Is there
anything in the licensing legalese which specifically mentions licensing on
virtual or multithreaded CPU's? Regardless, seems to me we need to have a
Boston Tea Party type rebellion and refuse to pay for licenses on virtual
CPU's.
With righteous indignation and virtuous rebellion,
Steve Orr
Bozeman, Montana
-----Original Message-----
Sent: Wednesday, November 20, 2002 2:23 AM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
on Linu
Orr, Steve,
I am using Xeon MP as well on my DELL 6650 , and i have two
nodes. I will patch my database next evening and later turn on the logical
cpu feature on one node and leave the other node as it is.
I will compare the cpu load/application responce time change and
give you the feedback.
Good luck
Regards
zhu chao
Eachnet DBA
86-21-32174588-667
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
www.happyit.net
www.cnoug.org(Chinese Oracle User Group)
======= 2002-11-18 14:25:00 ,you wrote��=======
>OK, I've got this new Dell Linux server with 4 "Hyperthreaded" Pentium4
Xeon
>CPU's. There are 4 physical CPU's but with hyperthreading the O/S sees 8
>CPU's as is reported in top. I've installed Oracle on this machine and it
>seems to run as if there really were 8 CPU's. Could that be true? Is there
a
>performance gain for Oracle? --As if I really did have 8 CPU's? How does
>this work? For init.ora tuning parameters should I count the 4 physical
>CPU's or the 8 virtual CPU's? Any reports on running Oracle/Linux on these
>hyperthreaded Pentium4 Xeon CPU's?
>
>I'm afraid to ask Oracle about the licensing since they always answer with
>the higher number. ;-)
>
>
>Steve Orr
>Bozeman, Montana
>--
>Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com
>--
>Author: Orr, Steve
> INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
--
Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com
--
Author: Orr, Steve
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