[dillab2]

If POWER LPARs are the same as Z LPARs then a lot of it comes down to the difference in licensing between hard and soft partitioned VMs. On a typical VM Oracle will charge for the entire cost of the machine, even if the DB is only running on a VM with a fraction of the resources, due to it being considered a soft partition.

At least on Z series mainframes, LPARs are considered hard partitions (handled by PR/SM, not the OS like a KVM situation) and are actually treated as different machines.

I am not sure if this is the case with POWER.

I've never heard of this website and don't know if they are a decent resource, but they seem to cover the issue the way I remember it. Looks like they are offering a license management product that tries to warn Oracle customers about this consideration. I'm sure Oracle slaps people pretty hard over this during their first audits, maybe even hard enough to get a company to shell out for IBM hardware :).

https://bluemedora.com/the-hard-and-the-soft-of-oracle-licen...