Oracle Support on AIX

In order to bring more clarity to Oracle’s support windows, and to give customers better predictability on upgrade timing, Oracle now identifies Oracle Database releases as Innovation Releases, or Long Term Releases. In response, IBM and Oracle now plan to focus our joint Oracle Database development activities on the next Long Term Release. Oracle will deliver the new features and enhancements in the Innovation Releases (such as the soon to be released 21c) to our joint customers on IBM Z and Power Systems via the next Long Term Releases.

Oracle Licensing on AIX

• Oracle do recognise an LPAR as a 'hard' partition.

• Capped LPARs are limited by Entitled Capacity.

• Uncapped LPARs are limited by the number of Online Virtual Processors.

Processor licenses for Oracle on POWER systems are subject to a core mutliplier:

POWER5 = 0.75

POWER6 = 1.00

POWER7 = 1.00

POWER8 = Unknown

To check if a partition is Capped or Uncapped:

lparstat -i | grep ^Mode

To check Entitled Capacity:

lparstat -i | grep Entitled | grep -v Pool

To check the number of virtual processors:

lparstat -i | grep "Online Virtual CPUs"

When working out total licenses required, remember that you will never need more licenses than are physically installed in the server (even if the total number of Online Virtual CPUs added up across all LPARs is higher than this figure). Also bear in mind the size of the processor pool (e.g. the server may have 10 physical CPUs, but all Oracle LPARs may be assigned to a pool with only 5 CPUs). If all Oracle licenses apply to LPARs that use the same processor pool, then the maximum licenses required is equal to the number of processors in the pool.

To find out the total number of physical processors:

lparstat -i | grep "Active Physical CPUs in system"

To find out the pool that your LPAR is in:

lparstat -l | grep "Shared Pool ID"

To find out the total number of physical processors assigned to the pool:

lparstat -l | grep "Active CPUs in Pool"

Together as a handy license information gathering script:

lparstat -i | grep ^Mode

lparstat -i | grep Entitled | grep -v Pool

lparstat -i | grep "Online Virtual CPUs"

lparstat -i | grep "Active Physical CPUs in system"

lparstat -i | grep "Shared Pool ID"

lparstat -i | grep "Active CPUs in Pool"

TurboCore

TurboCore is an IBM developed database workload optimisation feature of POWER7.

Using IBM processors in TurboCore mode is not permitted as a means to reduce the number of software licenses required; all cores must be licensed. (5)

IBM Power VM Live Partition Mobility

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. (5)

Bibliography