All Primary and Standby servers in a Data Guard configuration must be licensed for the same edition and options. Note that Data Guard is not separately licensable. The Active Data Guard option provides additional functionality over and above core Data Guard functionality.

Check your OLSA.

• Recent agreements allow for one unlicensed failover server/node in a clustered environment sharing single storage.

• Older agreements do not restrict the location of the unlicensed server (i.e. it doesn't need to be on shared storage).

• You can use the failover server/node on up to 10 separate 24-periods in a calendar year.

• Target environments must be licensed for the same edition and options (with the exception of RAC, unless it is used on the data recovery server).

• Exceptions are made for certain Oracle Data Management Cloud Services.

If you run in a VMWare environment and implement DR using a technology like SRM then this guidance suggests you must license the SRM target (despite the fact it's only actually usable during a DR invocation).

Whether this is regular backup testing or DR testing based on recovering backups...

• You can run up to 4 tests per calendar year

• Not exceeding 2 days per test