So, the bright side of Oracle hating the world (as evidenced through their arcane licensing structures) is the chance to get to do some creative technological circus acts and learn a lot in the process.
Here’s my original configuration:
Oracle 10g installed on a bare metal Dell PowerEdge 2850. Single Socket, Single Core, Hyperthreading turned off.
Why? Licensing. Even with Oracle’s ‘generous’ educational discounts, we cannot afford anything more. We license per core rather than per user/connection out of cost considerations. While this isn’t a terrible setup, it allows for no other protections other than backup (to tape, currently). Oracle does not allow you to bring much into the equation of data protection/redundancy/resiliency without, what? Oh yeah, more licensing. Want to replicate? License. Want to virtualize? Nope, gotta license all of your hosts cores. Ridiculous. Now, I’ve read a bunch of blogs and heard a bunch of users talk about ways using cluster tweaks to say they fall within Oracle’s virtualization scheme, but our Oracle rep (who likes to visit us often to check for compliance) has yet to confirm this does in fact fall within compliance.