How is Oracle licensed for Nutanix AHV?

In-Depth Answer

Start here if you are actually running VMware on Nutanix as opposed to AHV, which is Nutanix’s flavor of CentOS KVM.

Nutanix AHV adds VMware-like features–yes, including virtual motion–to CentOS KVM. Anyone remotely familiar with Oracle’s view on such features should take pause.

Under formal audit, customers are asked by Oracle to provide script output from VMware vCenters. This outs to Oracle all physical hosts, regardless of whether Oracle-centric virtual machines are running. Perhaps the good news for Nutanix AHV users is that no such auto-script is available by which Oracle can claim farm-wide shortfalls. Its up to customers using Prism Central to map and declare their physical Nutanix servers. Of course, Oracle is tempted to overreach and apply galaxy licensing given shared storage is a feature/benefit of Nutanix.

As with VMware, our approach is to license in good faith the compute capacity required to replicate Oracle’s solutions for high availability, disaster recovery, and systems management, including a few recommendations to isolate servers. This means servers not running Oracle can and should be licensed given their value towards business continuity of Oracle workloads.