Nothing new
I was managing Oracle and VMware at a company when we deployed them as a solution 9 or 10 years ago, I built the systems SPECIFICALLY to stay in license compliance with both. At the time it was ESX 3.5, I purchased DL380G5 servers, and only populated them with one socket a piece(Intel's first gen quad core) for Oracle licensing(technically at the time VMware did not support less than two socket systems, or was it you couldn't buy less than two sockets I forget which or maybe it was both).
I remember for production we were still bare metal so I went with the fastest dual core CPUs (for Oracle EE licensing). When we switched to Oracle SE, we went with quad core CPUs since SE was at the time anyway, licensed per socket vs EE was licensed per core. I remember significant pains on the DL380G5 servers our dual core systems had motherboards that were not compatible with quad core chips, it took HP a while to figure that out, they later updated the data sheet to reflect that.
Oracle, especially enterprise the licensing costs are good enough that you should be devoting hardware to it(if you want to run it in a hypervisor run it on dedicated hypervisors).
Oracle has had this stance for as long as I can remember, how folks these days would be caught off guard now is just sad.
My only use of Oracle these days has been as a vCenter back end. I use named user licensing for that.
I know Oracle better than I know MS SQL and I don't know DB2 at all which at the time were the 3 options for vCenter back end DB. It's been working fine for the past several years(and the cost is fine too) so no reason to change.
I'd be happy to use more Oracle but the company isn't interested in paying for it, so we get by with MySQL which works but instrumentation in MySQL is just a joke, always has been.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
