Partitioning; like mentioned in the “Oracle Partitioning Policy”, when a server is separated into individual sections:
Soft partitioning examples
VMware, HyperV, RHEV, KVM, Xen
Hard partitioning examples
Solaris Zones, SPARC LDOM, IBM LPAR, Fujitsu PPAR, OracleVM for x86
When hard partitioning is in place you need to license only bound CPU cores. Live Migration between to hosts will never be covered and will need to license all cores. (Except Oracle’s Trusted Partitions in Exalogic, Exalytics, Exadata and PCA). Otherwise you will need to license all cores in a VM cluster with Soft Partitioning.
Special Cases in VMware
VMware >5.0
In earlier VMware releases running VMs could be moved within one cluster, therefor you needed to license all cores within this VMware cluster.
Customers built their own Oracle Cluster in their VMware farm…
VMware 5.1 – 5.5
With this version a VM could be moved across cluster boundaries in a vCenter. So you had to license all servers and cores within a vCenter.
Customers built their own Oracle vCenter installation.
VMware 6.0<
There is no longer need to have a shared storage and you could migrate VMs across vCenter instances. That requires you to license all physical servers running VMware in your company. 🙂
There are rumours saying that some customers had a special agreement with Oracle to use VMware with a special setup, separated and not routed VLANs, SAN zoning and so on… but you will have to get in touch with Oracle to create your own special customer definition which might certify your setup but I am sure that this will only be allowed exactly for the version you are running now.
What I would recommend my customers; take a look at Oracle on Oracle solutions and use a seperate VM software like OracleVM next to your VMware.
BTW; OVM is “for free”, you only need to pay for support. If you would use Oracle hardware, the support comes with the hardware support contract.
Please keep in mind that there are special setups for hard partitioning you will have to follow to be on the safe side…