Paul,Not sure what recent interpretations you've seen, but to my knowledge the issue has been left in a gray area by Oracle, perhaps deliberately?
As a result, VMware is advising their Oracle customers <http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/vmw-understanding-oracle-certification-supportlicensing-environments.pdf> on how to navigate through that legal gray zone, with the basic idea that customers should virtualize but track/audit to prove that they did not implement virtualization contrary to the *intent* of Oracle licensing policies.
As far as Oracle's well-known threat to "withhold support for installations on VMware" (also addressed in the article), we have had several discussions about this here on the ORACLE-L list, including an informal poll asking if anyone has ever experienced this withholding of support. As I recall, nobody could substantiate this ever happening, so it might be considered a very slim (to non-existent) possibility.
Hope this helps... -Tim On 11/24/14 9:10, Paul Drake wrote:
I would have thought that recent interpretations of licensing the Oracle database server software in a virtualized environment (namely VMware vCenter 5.x) would have extinguished this as a possibility.On Nov 24, 2014 8:48 AM, "Juan Carlos Reyes Pacheco" <jcdrpllist@xxxxxxxxx <mailto:jcdrpllist@xxxxxxxxx>> wrote:Hello, please does anybody includes in the contract something against the use of virtual machines to install Oracle. One of our customer has a virtual machine that degrades the performance, and is necessary to restart the server periodically. They expect we solve something we can't solve, because the problem is in the virtual machine, other customer with the same software doesn't have that problem. I was asking myself if there is a "standard" clause in the contracts for the customer to free from problem related to virtual machines. In example I read there is no support from oracle for vmware machines, if you have a bug you have to demostrate this same bug happens in a physical installation too. Thank you :)