Alex, This is funny. What you call extreme I call normal. I have an IBM AIX p570 as a development machine with 15 Oracle databases on it. And a P690 with twice that. Right now they all share the same Oracle home (although we are finally applying the January security patches using a new Oracle home). Very stable. Reboot time is what I would call normal (less than 1 minute). The databases are always available - never down. So I guess I disagree with your assessment. The big machines (in my view) are the better machines for me. Tom ________________________________ From: Alex Gorbachev [mailto:gorbyx@xxxxxxxxx] Sent: Thursday, March 30, 2006 3:42 PM To: Mercadante, Thomas F (LABOR) Cc: MFontana@xxxxxxxxx; roger_xu@xxxxxxxxxxx; Oracle-L@Freelists. Org (E-mail) Subject: Re: two databases in a server Hi Tom, These are two extreme. * 30 servers with two DB's - too much efforts unless proper software management/deployment method plus monitoring is implemented. * Having 30 DB's on single machine is another extreme because one going "crazy" will impact others. Monitoring can be also a bit more difficult in this case. Also big machines with many DBs and many disks are less stable and boot time can be quite high in case it goes down or needs to be rebooted. I would prefer in this case something in the middle - like 5 machines each hosting 6 DBs. Here you can flexibility to group them to get more convenient maintenance windows as well as limit system outage impact. Cheers, Alex 2006/3/30, oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>: Michael, What you say is the reason the PC as database server revolution is slowly dieing out. Many servers means many licenses. One large server means one larger license. There is a significant cost savings. And as you said, manageability. I would much rather manage 30 databases on one server than thirty servers and thirty databases. Separate Oracle Homes where needed, and we are in business! Tom -- Best regards, Alex Gorbachev