Sub-capacity licensing: The current Oracle licensing model requires the Oracle RAC database to be licensed for all CPUs on each server in the cluster. Sometimes customers wish to use only a subset of the CPUs on the server for a particular Oracle RAC database. Oracle VM can be configured in such way that it is recognized as a hard partition. Hard partitions allow customers to only license those CPUs used by the partition instead of licensing all CPUs on the physical server. More information on sub-capacity licensing using hard partitioning can be found in the Oracle partitioning paper8
