• It's generally better, from a licensing perspective, to have fewer, faster cores, and scale by adding servers, rather than buying servers with more cores. 

• Buying multiple Oracle licenses in a single transaction generally yields a higher level of discount but does limit the ability to reduci annual cost by reducing cores and cancelling the Oracle support contract for those cores.

• If you know your application has a limited life, consider term licenses to reduce initial cost and more readily realise cost savings on support later. But note that this is not cost effective if you need to buy a new term license each time the current license expires.

Hard Partitioning

Soft Partitioning

• Sun Physical Domains

• Solaris Zones

• Oracle Trusted Partitions

• IBM LPAR

• IBM micro-partitions

• HPE vPar

• HPE nPar

• Integrity Virtual Machine

• Secure Resource Partitions

• Fujitsu PPAR

• Oracle VM (OVM)

• Oracle KVM

• VMWare vSphere

• Solaris 9 Resource Containers

• IBM AIX Workload Manager (WPAR)

• HP Resource Manager

• Affinity Management