My colleagues and I have been having a little debate about Oracle SE 12c licensing for Oracle RAC.
It’s clear from Oracle docs that single instance 12c SE can be licensed on a host with a max of two sockets and Oracle will throttle thread usage to a max of 16 per database, regardless of the threads available. And a customer can run as many databases on this hosts as they want, resources available, with each database throttled to 16 threads.
With RAC you are allowed two nodes on which Oracle will throttle the thread usage to 8 max per instance on each of the two nodes. And again a customer can run as many databases as they want on this two-node cluster with each instance throttled to use 8 threads. The debate is about the number of sockets allowed on these RAC nodes: one or two sockets per node? The Oracle docs are not clear on this. I’m coming to think these must be one socket hosts, as presumably with two-sockets a customer could run more databases per cluster, than with one-socket hosts. But I don’t know as the Oracle seems to imply at different points that either one-socket or two-socket hosts are permitted when running 12c SE RAC.
Has anyone heard a statement from Oracle on this?
Thanks,
bg