Actually, no they're not. Oracle has a per-core license for Enterprise. Even on their own hardware (my knowledge is a couple of years old, so it may have chan

Actually, no they're not. Oracle has a per-core license for Enterprise. Even on their own hardware (my knowledge is a couple of years old, so it may have changed), you either had to license the entire machine or link the database to a subset of the cores. We ran into just this situation where we had large combined nodes with a database tier and an application tier running in different LDOMs (Solaris VM-equivalents) on the same hardware. Limiting the database server to just the cores it needed dropped the license costs insanely. If a job is able to float around a cluster, the entire cluster would need to be licensed. As the article says, VMWare has a document stating exactly this. From VMWare: "Scenario B: Partially Licensed Clusters When a customer does not have enough Oracle application instances to justify creating a dedicated cluster for those applications, only a subset of the hosts in the cluster are licensed for the Oracle application. In this situation, the customer must be careful to restrict the movement of Oracle application instances and virtual machines to only those hosts that are licensed to run the product." http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/vmw-understanding-oracle-certification-supportlicensing-environments.pdf http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/vmw-understanding-...