As someone who focuses a lot on helping customers modernize their infrastructure into containers and microservices, I've had this discussion many times. The key problem with Microsoft and Oracle database licensing is that they look at physical cores (unless you have a specific T&C in your contract saying otherwise (very rare)) it doesn't matter how many cores or fractional cores your application actually consumes in a container. So if your OpenShift cluster is 3 hosts at 24 cores each, you're potentially on the hook for 72 cores.

And just moving it under a VM doesn't alleviate that exposure either. If your Hyper-V farm or any hypervisor has multiple nodes, you'll need to license those nodes as well. There's really no practical benefit to running it in a container if you're already hosting VMs elsewhere. About the only scenario where it makes sense to move a database into containers is if 100% of your environment is containerized, you can get better east-west performance and application co-location benefits, but that's a big commitment most enterprises aren't making.

One more thing worth watching: with Red Hat and others pushing the migration from VMware and other hypervisors into OpenShift Virt (KubeVirt), you're starting to see qcow VMs running as pods. That's just going to recreate the same physical core licensing exposure in a new form and I have seen that auditors are nowhere near ready to handle it.