Oracle Licensing on VMWare

Licensing

Oracle do not recognise VMWare partitions as 'hard' partitions. Therefore Oracle assert that you need to license all cores on all physical servers that your Virtual Machine could run on. This would mean that you need to run a VMWare environment managed by an isolated VCenter deployment i.e. Oracle say that you cannot have the ability to migrate any Oracle database virtual machines to any other VMWare cluster (that isn't fully licensed for Oracle database). Unless you have an isolated VMWare environment dedicated solely to Oracle systems this is unlikely to be cost effective.

However, legal precedent suggests that Oracle's position may not stand up in court. In 2015 there was a court case between Mars and Oracle where this topic (excuse the pun) came up. Oracle were unable to show any contractual support in the OLSA for the interpretations of "installed" and "used" that their position assumes.

Some good analysis is available here: 

If you choose to follow the VMWare Guidance above, be very sure that your affinity rules are robust. An accidental vMotion to an unlicensed server can be costly.

Support

NOTE: The Oracle Support Policy for Oracle on VMWare was significantly updated in October 2019 as part of a Cloud related partnership between Oracle and VMWare announced by Larry Ellison at Oracle Open World.

Oracle's support position for products running on VMware is outlined in My Oracle Support Article 249212.1...

Bibliography

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