Production Site Licensing

Oracle is typically licensed per physical processor and it is required to license all processors on the hypervisor host on which the Oracle database VM was installed. The Oracle VM should be kept running on this host for this reason. It is recommended to license all of the processors in a second hypervisor host to allow High Availability failover, vMotion (in VMware vSphere environments), or Live Migration (in Microsoft Hyper-V environments) between hypervisor hosts without breaching Oracle licensing terms.

If HA and DRS rules are utilized to keep the Oracle databases VMs on both the hypervisor hosts that have Oracle licensing, then these hypervisor hosts can form part of a larger cluster. It is not a requirement to maintain a separate Oracle hypervisor cluster, or license all of the hosts in a cluster, only ensure that the hosts on which the Oracle database VMs run are licensed.

Note: It is technically possible to license only the processors in one hypervisor host, but the Oracle VMs would need to be shut down when performing host maintenance and would not have any high availability capabilities to avoid breaching licensing terms; therefore, this is not recommended.