Oracle Licensing on VMware - Reprise

There has been a lot of traffic on the DLs on this issue today, so I thought a discussion topic on the subject of Oracle licensing on VMware would be appropriate again.

My good friend Dave Welch from House of Brick and I have a friendly disagreement over this one: Dave maintains that the DRS / HA cluster host affinity rules combined with VMware VMotion logging is adequate to provide an audit trail of what server a VM has run on, and this should suffice for Oracle licensing purposes. Not that I disagree that this would be highly desirable. As an attorney, however, I am a bit more conservative: So far Oracle has maintained (at least from what my customers are telling me) that all ESX servers in any DRS / HA cluster must be fully licensed if there is a single Oracle VM on that cluster regardless of where that VM has run.

Thus, Sam and I have established our position which is reflected in our VMworld 2011 presentation: The customer is fully protected if he / she maintains an isolated, dedicated DRS / HA cluster on which only Oracle VMs are allowed to run. This also eliminates any potential for performance issues from non-Oracle VMs interfering with Oracle VMs, as Sam has pointed out today. While this configuration undoubtedly increases costs in terms of hardware and VMware-related software, those costs are minute (I really like the Chad-ism "mice nuts") compared to the potential increased costs for Oracle license and maintenance fees.

Hence my discussion: Who out there believes that DRS / HA cluster host affinity is good enough for Oracle licensing? Are there any customers who have broached this issue with Oracle? What has been the result? Inquiring minds really, really want to know.