My company has an application that currently runs on a physical Solaris 10/SPARC server with ISAM databases. We want to move to a RHEL 5/Oracle VM. The application vendor says that the virtual machine requires the same amount of RAM and same number of CPU's (4) as a physical server, which seems like overkill.
My first question is can the number of vCPU's be increased on the VM after installation if I find I need more CPU resources without having any ill effects on the VM and Oracle in particular ( I was thinking of starting with 2 vCPU's and working up if needed)?
Second question - the # cores/socket setting - for 2 vCPU's is there any benefit in setting 2 cores/socket rather than 1 (host has 2 quad-core CPU). If I understand what I've read correctly, that really only helps when the # of available cores exceeds the hard limit of CPU's in an OS.
Thank you for your help.
