Oracle Licencing in Solaris Zones

Question

Scenario
If we setup a server with 6 processors and we setup 1 resource pool with 4 processors called oracle_pool.
We then create 2 Oracle Containers both using the same resource pool, ie "oracle_pool", will I require 4, 6 or 8 Oracle Processor Licences ?
The CPUs are single threaded to keep it simple.
Every example I find only talks about one to one relationships between containers and resource pools.

Answer 1

I think your Oracle sales rep would have the final word on this, but I believe you would need 8 cores of license (2 x 4 core). Assuming you're not using a [discounted core from a multicore system|http://www.oracle.com/corporate/contracts/library/processor-core-factor-table.pdf] . You wouldn't owe for just 4 cores even though you've made a 4-core pool because you have 2 containers sharing that pool, which doesn't meet the '[hard partitioning|http://www.sun.com/third-party/global/oracle/consolidation/Containers_Oracle_041305.pdf]' requirement that would limit it to 4 (basically a pool dedicated to a single container).
As far as I know the licensing terms always refer to physical processors not
virtual processors. So 6 physical CPU's requires a licence for 6 processors.Looking at the first linked PDF, they track cores, not sockets... but they typically count each core in multicore as 0.5 or 0.75 of a license (so a single socket quad-core Xeon may need 2 licenses, not 4 or 1). But I don't make quotes for a living, so I may be totally wrong :)
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