A few days ago someone showed me a pricing guide from a Linux vendor and I was a bit surprised at the complexity of it. Especially when you look at larger servers (4 or 8 sockets) and when adding virtual machine use into the mix.
I think we have a very compelling and simple pricing model for both Oracle Linux and Oracle VM. Let me see if I can explain it in 1 page, not 10 pages.

This pricing information is publicly available on the Oracle store, I am using the current public list prices. Also keep in mind that this is for customers using non-oracle x86 servers. When a customer purchases an Oracle x86 server, the annual systems support includes full use (all you can eat) of Oracle Linux, Oracle VM and Oracle Solaris (no matter how many VMs you run on that server, in case you deploy guests on a hypervisor). This support level is the equivalent of premier support in the list below.

Let's start with Oracle VM (x86) :
Oracle VM support subscriptions are per physical server on which you deploy the Oracle VM Server product.

(1) Oracle VM Premier Limited -> 1- or 2 socket server : $599 per server per year

(2) Oracle VM Premier -> more than 2 socket server (4, or 8 or whatever more) : $1199 per server per year

The above includes the use of Oracle VM Manager and Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control's Virtualization management pack (including self service cloud portal, etc..)

24x7 support, access to bugfixes, updates and new releases. It also includes all options, live migrate, dynamic resource scheduling, high availability, dynamic power management, etc

If you want to play with the product, or even use the product without access to support services, the product is freely downloadable from edelivery.

Next, Oracle Linux :
Oracle Linux support subscriptions are per physical server.
If you plan to run Oracle Linux as a guest on Oracle VM, VMWare or Hyper-v, you only have to pay for a single subscription per system, we do not charge per guest or per number of guests. In other words, you can run any number of Oracle Linux guests per physical server and count it as just a single subscription.

(1) Oracle Linux Network Support -> any number of sockets per server : $119 per server per year

Network support does not offer support services. It provides access to the Unbreakable Linux Network and also offers full indemnification for Oracle Linux.

(2) Oracle Linux Basic Limited Support -> 1- or 2 socket servers : $499 per server per year

This subscription provides 24x7 support services, access to the Unbreakable Linux Network and the Oracle Support portal, indemnification, use of Oracle Clusterware for Linux HA and use of Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud control for Linux OS management. It includes ocfs2 as a clustered filesystem.

(3) Oracle Linux Basic Support -> more than 2 socket server (4, or 8 or more) : $1199 per server per year

This subscription provides 24x7 support services, access to the Unbreakable Linux Network and the Oracle Support portal, indemnification, use of Oracle Clusterware for Linux HA and use of Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud control for Linux OS management. It includes ocfs2 as a clustered filesystem

(4) Oracle Linux Premier Limited Support -> 1- or 2 socket servers : $1399 per server per year

This subscription provides 24x7 support services, access to the Unbreakable Linux Network and the Oracle Support portal, indemnification, use of Oracle Clusterware for Linux HA and use of Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud control for Linux OS management, XFS filesystem support. It also offers Oracle Lifetime support, backporting of patches for critical customers in previous versions of package and ksplice zero-downtime updates.

(5) Oracle Linux Premier Support -> more than 2 socket servers : $2299 per server per year

This subscription provides 24x7 support services, access to the Unbreakable Linux Network and the Oracle Support portal, indemnification, use of Oracle Clusterware for Linux HA and use of Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud control for Linux OS management, XFS filesystem support. It also offers Oracle Lifetime support, backporting of patches for critical customers in previous versions of package and ksplice zero-downtime updates.

(6) Freely available Oracle Linux -> any number of sockets

You can freely download Oracle Linux, install it on any number of servers and use it for any reason, without support, without right to use of these extra features like Oracle Clusterware or ksplice, without indemnification. However, you do have full access to all errata as well. Need support? then use options (1)..(5)

So that's it. Count number of 2 socket boxes, more than 2 socket boxes, decide on basic or premier support level and you are done. You don't have to worry about different levels based on how many virtual instance you deploy or want to deploy. A very simple menu of choices. We offer, inclusive, Linux OS clusterware, Linux OS Management, provisioning and monitoring, cluster filesystem (ocfs), high performance filesystem (xfs), dtrace, ksplice, ofed (infiniband stack for high performance networking). No separate add-on menus.

NOTE : socket/cpu can have any number of cores. So whether you have a 4,6,8,10 or 12 core CPU doesn't matter, we count the number of physical CPUs.