Oracle VM offers an advanced feature for hard partitioning, also known as CPU pinning. Hard partitioning means binding a virtual machine CPU to a physical CPU (on x86) or core (on SPARC), and preventing it from running on other physical cores than the ones specified. This is done for Oracle CPU licensing purposes, since Oracle VM is licensed on a per-CPU basis.
CPU pinning cannot be configured using Oracle VM Manager; it can only be set up using the Oracle VM Utilities.
Hard partitioning is described in its own white paper available on the Oracle Technology Network. This white paper describes setting up hard partitioning using the Oracle VM Utilities. The hard partitioning white paper is titled Hard Partitioning With Oracle VM Server for x86 and located at:
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/vm/ovm-hardpart-168217.pdf
Live-migration of CPU pinned virtual machines to another Oracle VM Server is not permitted under the terms of the license. Consequently, DRS and DPM policies should not be enabled for server pools containing CPU pinned guests.
If your Oracle VM Servers support NUMA (non-uniform memory access), make sure that the systems are running correctly in NUMA mode. In a clustered setup, a CPU can access its local memory faster than non-local and shared memory. To make full use of the performance advantages of NUMA, be sure to pin the virtual VCPUs to the same physical CPU on an Oracle VM Server. For more information about NUMA, consult your server hardware documentation.
For information about special Oracle hard partitioning licensing policies, see the Oracle Technology Network and open the PDF document on the subject of Partitioning located at:
http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/specialty-topics/index.html