SPARC T systems run a hypervisor, so even the primary partition is virtualised!
Yes, named user plus works in a 'virtual' environment.
The caveats here are:
- Oracle only deal in whole integer units w.r.t. cores. If you use a 4 vCPU LDom (i.e. 0.5 of a SPARC T core) you still use 1 core licence on that system
- The users count has a minimum like er.. 20 (I think) <ouch!>
Acceptable technologies to 'hard' partition a Solaris 'instance' - according to Oracle - also include zones with either a dedicated-cpu or capped-cpu setting.
The dedicated-cpu setting apparently fixes the CPUs that will run RDBMS threads.
Ironically the capped-cpu setting caps concurrent threads. It allows Oracle RDBMS to run on any CPU core it can see, capping the concurrency.
The irony of this setting is that in a VMware cluster (not ESX server but whole cluster of them) Oracle claim that there is a potential for RDBMS threads to run on any CPU in the cluster and thus they total the CPUs in the cluster to calculate the licence fee.
Hmmm...
Note that the OS hardware and state are recorded in an audit table within an Oracle RDBMS. Oracle are happy to query that and back charge if you are tardy in getting your resource utilisation under control. Then there are licenced features... but you didn't ask about those in this post!