This document discusses optimizing Oracle licensing on IBM Power Systems. It describes the advantages of Power Systems for virtualization and workload consolidation which can reduce licensing costs. It provides an overview of Oracle editions and their pricing, noting opportunities to use Standard Edition to save costs versus Enterprise Edition. It also discusses when RAC may not be needed on Power Systems due to its high availability features, and how PowerVM partitioning is recognized by Oracle for "sub-capacity pricing" based on actual cores used.

1. Oracle on Power –
Power advantages and license
optimization
© 2013 IBM CorporationAlexander Hartmann <alexander.hartmann@de.ibm.com>
1
November 2013
IBM Power Systems Technical University
Athens, Greece
November 2013

2. Agenda
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 Advantages of Power Systems
 Virtualization on Power Systems
 Description of Power processor terms
 Oracle Editions
 Standard Edition
 RAC
 Sub-capacity pricing
 Licensing examples
 Summary of Power Advantages

3. Advantages of Power Systems
Availability
IBM
Scalability
Virtualization
Efficency
Security
GreenIT
3

4. Virtualization on Power Systems
 CPU Virtualization: Dedicated, Donating, Shared
– Multiple Processor Pools
• Group by ISV, environment, department, agency, desired functionality
(licenses), etc
 Memory Virtualization: Dedicated or shared
– Active Memory Expansion
– Active Memory Sharing
– Memory Deduplication
 Network/SAN/Int. Disks: Dedicated or shared (using Virtual I/O – Servers)
 Virtualization of processor cores and consolidation of workload
is the basic concept for saving license costs
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5. 7
Virtualization on Power Systems – Power advantages
 Virtualization is build into the system, “Hardware based virtualization”
 Therefore there is no overhead when you consolidate several systems
onto one Power server
 Competitors only have software based virtualization which suffer from
partially extreme overhead depending on system size and load
 VMWare, Xen, Oracle VM (based on Xen) are software based
 Only Oracle VM for SPARC also offers firmware-based hypervisor, but that
one does not support sharing of CPU / memory / adapter resources or
dynamic reallocation no efficient consolidation possible
Source: A Comparison of PowerVM and VMware vSphere 4.1 update 1 Virtualization Performance, Edison Group, September 2011.
http://public.dhe.ibm.com/common/ssi/ecm/en/pol03090usen/POL03090USEN.PDF

6. Workload Consolidation
 Consolidation allows you to size your system for the average usage plus
overhead for peaks of some LPARs (but not all as long as peaks do not
happen at the same time)
 Sharing CPU ressources lowers the number of required licenses
8

7. Workload Consolidation
 Consolidation allows you to save:
– Licenses (share CPU ressources)
– Memory (Compression, Sharing), Physical Adapters (Sharing)
• Followup-Costs (How expensive is one managed LAN/SAN port?)
– Rack / Floor Space
– Power / Cooling
Enhancement of server utilization
from 17% to 60% at a consolidation
from 64 dedicated servers with 256
cores on one server with 72 cores
High-performance Power7
server enable a very efficent
server environment
9

8. Power advantages – High availability
 AIX offers the highest availability and RAS features on the UNIX market
 No need to invest in Oracle – RAC to have a high availability, PowerHA might be
enough
15
35
38
54
125
150
180
min/year
Downtime minutes per year of server operating systems
180
160
140
120
100
80
60
40
20
0
AIX on Power Solaris on
SPARC
HP-UX SuSE Linux RHEL Windows
Server 2008
Windows
Server 2003
Plattform
* compare ITIC study, “ITIC 2009 Global Server Hardware and Server OS Reliability Survey”, July 2009
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9. Power advantages – High per-core performance
 High single thread performance
– Up to 4,42 GHz
– 80 MB L3-Cache
– Up to 4 threads per core (SMT-4)
 Power 8 will provide
– Up to 12 cores / socket
– 96 MB L3-Cache
– Up to 128MB L4-Cache (off-chip)
– Up to 8 threads per core (SMT-8)
 High single thread performance will speed up applications / tasks that cannot be
parallelized
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10. • Dedicated: Used exclusively for a single
LPAR
• Shared: Pool of physical processors for
several LPARs (multiple pools can be
configured)
• Virtual: “Virtual cores” which look like
real cores for an LPAR, this is where
overcommitment takes place
• Logical: Each virtual processor can run
1, 2 or 4 threads (SMT), similar to
HyperThreading on x86. The amount
(1,2 or 4) can be configured
1in2dependently for each LPAR
• Physical:“Real physical cores”
• Active
• CoD (can be activated on an daily
basis or permanently with license
keys)
• deconfigured (broken)
• Entitled Capacity (EC): Number of physical cores
guaranteed for an LPAR. This guarantee cannot be
overcommitted. However if one LPAR does not need its
guaranteed resources they are automatically redistributed to
LPARs which need more power (up to the number of virtual
processors) each 10 milliseconds
• Capped/Uncapped: Controls whether an LPAR is allowed to
use more than their EC or not
Description of Power processor terms

11. Oracle Editions
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 Enterprise Edition
– Flagship Oracle database
– Many options (with cost) available (RAC, Partitioning, Advanced
Compression, OLAP, etc)
– Licensed by core or “named user”
 Standard Edition
– Four- socket version, including full clustering support (RAC support)
– Licensed by socket or “named user”
 Standard Edition One
– Two-socket version of Standard Edition (w/o RAC support)
– Licensed by socket or “named user”
 Personal Edition
– Full-featured (except RAC) version for a single user
 Express Edition
– Free of charge, limited (1 Core, 4GB of data), online forum support
 Oracle Database Mobile Server (formerly: Oracle Database Lite)
– Complete database software for the mobile database applications

12. Oracle Editions - List Prices [ October 2013 ]
14
 Enterprise Edition
– 47.500$/core + 10.450$/core/year maintenance
– RAC: 23.000$/core + 5.060$/core/year maintenance
– Partitioning: 11.500$/core + 2.530$/core/year maintenance
 Standard Edition
– 17.500$/socket + 3.850$/socket/year maintenance
– RAC included (Limit: total of 4 sockets in entire RAC)
 Standard Edition One
– 5.800$/socket + 1.276$/socket/year maintenance
 Oracle Processor Core Factor Table:
– Multiplier for core count depending on processor model/type
 P780/795 Turbo Core does not limit number of cores to license (you still
have to license 8 cores, not just 4)
– That’s the official statement from Oracle … discuss this topic with them,
some customers report that Oracle aggeed to only charge 4 cores
 Unlimited License Agreement available, SAP licensing schema available

13. Use cases for Standard Edition on Power Systems
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 If Standard Edition offers all features that you need you can save a
significant amount of license cost
 Use case 1 : 2 node RAC
– 2 x p730/p740 with 2 sockets / 16 cores each
– Total of 32 cores, 128 logical CPU
 Use case 2 : 1 node database, 4 Sockets
– 1 x p750 with 4 sockets / 32 cores / 128 logical CPU
– License cost (SE, 3 years): 4x17.500$ + 3x 4x 3.850$ =
– License cost (EE, 3 years):
116.200$
32x47.500$ + 3x32x10.450$ = 2.523.200$
 Use case 3 : 1 node database, 2 Sockets
– 1 x p730/740 with 2 sockets / 16 cores / 64 logical CPU
– License cost (SE One, 3 years): 2x 5.800$ + 3x 2x 1.276$ = 19.256$
– License cost (EE, 3 years): 16x47.500$ + 3x16x10.450$ = 1.261.600$
– License cost (SE, 3 years): 4x17.500$ + 3x 4x 3.850$ = 116.200$
– License cost (EE, 3 years): 32x47.500$ + 3x32x10.450$ +
(RAC option): 32x23.000$ + 3x32x 5.060$ = 3.744.960$

14. Most Important Features missing in Standard Edition
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 No Compression, Encryption, Partitioning
 No Online index rebuild, online table redefinition, most Flashback features
missing
 No Parallel Query, DML, Statistics Gathering, Index Builds, Datapump
 No DataGuard, but
– If DG is used for having a “30 minutes behind production” – database
(to recover from logical data errors) a “Manual Standby Database” can
be used, this requires just a few SQL and Unix scripts, see e.g.
http://www.databasejournal.com/features/oracle/article.ph
p/3682421/Manual-Standby-Database-under-Oracle-Standard-
Edition.htm
– If DG is used as a disaster recovery system to mirror data to a remote
data centre a design alternative could be to replicate the data to remote
data centre on SAN level. If the primary site fails the LUNs can be made
visible on the backup nodes, after startup of Oracle a crash recovery will
be done, after that the database is available again.

15. RAC – Really needed if running on Power Systems?
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 Costs 50% On Top of Enterprise Edition
 Really needed for all (consolidated) instances? By building more than one
Shared Processor Pool you will need to buy RAC licenses only for a part of
the system while still being able to consolidate
 Adds additional complexity / dangers of (operating/software) errors
 Use Cases for RAC:
– Higher overall performance
Power Systems provides single machines which can handle “your
workload”
In addition RAC introduces scalability problems which might cause
you to rewrite / modify your application and/or schema (Sequences,
Indexes on ascending / date columns)
– Higher availability
Power Systems have the highest availability and RAS features on the
UNIX market

16. RAC – Really needed if running on Power Systems?
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 Use Cases for RAC (cont.):
– Availability during planned machine downtimes
Move your LPAR to a different machine using Live Partition Mobility
with no downtime (* Might also be “expensive”, see later *)
– Availability during planned OS updates
Move your database to another LPAR using DataGuard or PowerHA
– Availability during planned database updates
Oracle supports “Rolling Updates” in a RAC environment for “some”
patches
However, does it always work?
Is this really an option for your mission-critical system?
You will probably need a planned downtime anyway
– Recommendation: No need to use RAC

17. Oracle editions – Licensing availability on Power Systems
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For Standard Edition licensing eligibility with RAC the total number of sockets in the
cluster is considered, not just the number of sockets in an individual system.
Some Power7+ are Dual Chip Modules (DCM, 2 chips on each socket). Oracle counts those
as 2 sockets each.
Power Systems Product Description Oracle Database Edition
Core Pricing Socket Pricing
Power Systems
Model
Maximum
Cores
Maximum Oracle Socket
Count
Oracle Enterprise
Edition
Oracle
Standard
Edition
Oracle
Standard
Edition One
Power 710 (+) 8 (8) 1 (1) Yes Yes Yes
Power 720 (+) 8 (8) 1 (1) Yes Yes Yes
Power 730 (+) 16 (16) 2 (2) Yes Yes Yes
Power 740 (+) 16 (16) 2 (2) Yes Yes Yes
Power 750 (+) 32 (32) 4 (8 due to DCM) Yes Yes/No No
Power 760+ 48 8 due to DCM Yes No No
Power 770 (+) 64 (64) 16 Yes No No
Power 780 (+) 128 (128) 16 Yes No No
Power 795 256 32 Yes No No

18. Oracle editions – Licensing availability on Power Systems
20
For Standard Edition licensing eligibility with RAC the total number of sockets in the
cluster is considered, not just the number of sockets in an individual system.
(*) Running PowerLinux, only Oracle 10g available
Power Systems Product Description Oracle Database Edition
Core Pricing Socket Pricing
Power Systems
Model
Maximum Cores Maximum Oracle
Socket Count
Oracle Enterprise
Edition
Oracle
Standard
Edition
Oracle
Standard
Edition One
PS 700 4 1 Yes Yes Yes
PS 701 8 1 Yes Yes Yes
PS 702 16 2 Yes Yes Yes
PS 703 16 2 Yes Yes Yes
PS 704 32 4 Yes Yes No
p260 16 2 Yes Yes Yes
p270 24 4 due to DCM Yes Yes No
p460 32 4 Yes Yes No
p24L (*) 16 2 Yes Yes Yes
7R1 (*) 8 1 Yes Yes Yes
7R2 (*) 16 2 Yes Yes Yes
7R4 (*) 32 4 Yes Yes No

19. Oracle recognizes IBM PowerVM for sub-capacity pricing
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• Hard partitioning means that only the part of the server that is used for Oracle
workload has to be licensed.
• This is referred to as “sub-capacity” pricing
• LPARs (DLPARs) on Power are accepted ways to do Hard partitioning .
• Soft partitioning is the standard for most other virtualization techniques, e.g.
VMWare, XEN, KVM, Oracle VM (depending on configuration) or IBM WPARs.
• Soft partitioning it is not eligible for Oracle partitioning "sub-capacity" pricing
• Oracle VM (based on Xen) can be configured in a way that it is eligible for hard
partitioning, but then the number of assigned cores has to be hard-coded and
cannot be changed without restarting the partition (in contrast to Dynamic LPAR –
options with PowerVM)

20. Oracle and Live Partition Mobility
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• Live Partition Mobility enables you to move your running LPAR from one physical
host to another without interuption of service. This could be used for e.g.
maintenance or for load balancing features.
• End of August Oracle updated their “Partitioning Policy” document:
http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/partitioning-070609.pdf
• It now contains the following paragraph:
IBM Power VM Live Partition Mobility is not an approved hard partitioning technology. All
cores on both the source and destination servers in an environment using IBM Power VM
Live Partition Mobility must be licensed.
• This means that even if you have only a single LPAR which is configured with 4 cores
(resulting in 4 licenses) you would have to license your entire source and target server
(imagine a pair of p770 with 64 cores each)
• Please complain at your local Oracle representative to further be allowed to use this
really benificial feature without having to pay exorbitant license costs which technically make
no sense (you are never using more than those 4 cores for your workload)

21. Oracle recognizes IBM PowerVM for sub-capacity pricing
• Shared Processor Pools:
If several LPARs running
Oracle software use a
Shared Processor Pool
only the number of cores
in that pool have to be
licensed
Note:
No official “external”
document exists, but
Oracle LMS handles it
that way. You can ask
Oracle for a free
Advisory Service to
approve your setup
23

22. The Processor Core Factor
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 For all “core based” – licenses a core factor for each processor type is defined
 Examples
– UltraSparc T1 < 1.4GHz, T3 0.25
– UltraSparc T1 1.4GHz, T2+, T4, T5, SPARC64 VII+,
M5, M6, Opteron, Xeon, Itanium before Dec. 2010
0.5
0.5
– SPARC64 VI, VII, UltraSparc IV, IV+, T2,
Power5+ (or earlier)
0.75
0.75
– Power6/7/7+, System z
Itanium after Dec. 2010
1.0
1.0
 Even though Oracle charges more for Power Systems you can still save
license costs on Power as you can better consolidate your instances due to a
much more efficient virtualization compared to e.g. VMWare
 Always check the official list on the Oracle website as it is regularly updated.

23. Capacity on Demand
25
 Oracle charges for the maximum number of processors the product can
run on at a specific time.
 The customer need not license the CoD (Capacity on Demand) until it is
turned on, and then only if the capacity is available to Oracle
– If the intent of turning on the CoD is not for Oracle database usage,
there are many ways to limit the active Oracle partition(s) so they can't
use the capacity.
– When CoD is on, and depending on the mix of partitions, customer can
also set the processor values to be consistent with the Oracle licensed
values.
– When CoD is on, for an Oracle LPAR, the customer may have to
purchase additional Oracle licenses if they don’t currently own enough
to cover the additional cores.

24. Licensing examples - Disclaimer
 The following slides show a few examples how you could design your
system and what impact that would have on the number of licenses that
you have to buy.
 The information is based on Oracle’s Global Licensing website
( http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/index.html ). That website
must be consulted for any formal and official clarification on Oracle’s
Licensing.
 Those examples should be used to get an idea which setups are possible
and make good use of sub-capacity licensing.
 Therefore you should use those examples as a guideline to design
your system and ask Oracle to accept your configuration.
<<This document is not officially approved by Oracle - IBM is not liable for incorrect or incomplete information.>>26

25. Detailed licensing rules – visual examples will follow
<<This document is not officially approved by Oracle - IBM is not liable for incorrect or incomplete information.>>27

26. Core Licensing : Dedicated LPARs
 Number of cores to license: 6
<<This document is not officially approved by Oracle - IBM is not liable for incorrect or incomplete information.>>28

27. Core Licensing : Shared processor pool
 LPAR1: EC=1 + capped : 1 core
 LPAR2: VP=6 + uncapped: 6 cores
 Number of cores to license: 6 (number of CPUs in pool)
<<This document is not officially approved by Oracle - IBM is not liable for incorrect or incomplete information.>>29

28. Core Licensing : Shared processor pool
 LPAR1: EC=2 + capped : 2 cores
 LPAR2: VP=3 + uncapped: 3 cores
 Number of cores to license: 5 (EC=2 in LPAR3 does not count)
<<This document is not officially approved by Oracle - IBM is not liable for incorrect or incomplete information.>>30

29. Core Licensing : Shared processor pool
 LPAR1: EC=1.6 + capped : 1.6 cores
 LPAR2: VP=2 + uncapped: 2 cores
 Number of cores to license: 4 (3.6 rounded up)
<<This document is not officially approved by Oracle - IBM is not liable for incorrect or incomplete information.>>31

30. Core Licensing : Multiple shared processor pool
 LPAR1: EC=1.6 + capped : 1.6 cores
 LPAR2: VP=5 + uncapped: 5 cores
 LPAR1+2: 5 cores max
 LPAR4: VP=2 + uncapped: 2 cores
 Number of cores to license: 7
<<This document is not officially approved by Oracle - IBM is not liable for incorrect or incomplete information.>>32

31. PowerVM offers optimized use of Oracle-licensed CPUs
Processors in the Virtual I/O Servers which handle
all the I/O do not have to be licensed!
- Oracle only has to be licensed for cores used by Oracle-LPARs, not the entire server
- Multiple pools (e.g. Standalone, RAC, etc) within a single POWER7 - server possible
- Within the Shared Pools „regular“ micro-partitioning
- Unique feature of IBM PowerVM
Dynamically Resizable
15 Cores
1
Cores
Linux
Oracle10g
Oracle9i
Oracle11g
Oracle10g
Oracle11g
Oracle10g
Shared Processor Pool 3
N
1
Cores
Linux
LAN
3
Cores
Linux
AL
3 3
Cores Cores
Linux AIX
V5.3
LInint uVxirt
Manager
Storage
Sharing
Ethernet
Sharing
POWER Hypervisor
6 Cores
LInint uVxirt
Manager
Storage
Sharing
Ethernet
Sharing
7 Cores
Virtual LAN
OraclePart.ing
2 Cores
Virtual I/O
Server
Partition
2 Cores
Virtual I/O
Server
Partition
WebSphere
WebSphere
WebSphere
WebSphere
WebSphere
OraclePart.ing
OraclePart.ing
Shared Processor Shared Processor
Pool 2Pool 1
Virtual I/O paths
SAN SAN
LAN<<This document is not officially approved by Oracle - IBM is not liable for incorrect or incomplete information.>L>AN
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32. Power Advantages for Oracle databases
35
 High performance / core
 Highest availability in the UNIX market
 Perfect platform for consolidation of instances / virtualization of resources
while having a strong separation of environments like using separate
hardware
 You only have to license exactly what you need
 Virtualization without overhead due to firmware implementation
 Active Memory Expansion supported with Oracle 11gR2
 Live Partition Mobility supported with Oracle 10gR2, 11gR1 and 11gR2
(single instance) and 11gR2 (RAC) – But as of now you have to license your
entire servers
 Sell your surplus licenses !!!
(European Court of Justice decision in July 2012 – Oracle vs. UsedSoft )

33. Thank you
Alexander Hartmann
Senior IT Specialist
Migration Factory
Lab Services System p
Alexander.Hartmann@de.ibm.com
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