On 5 January 2012 22:26, John R Pierce pierce@hogranch.com wrote:
this doesn't mean it won't work, but what it does mean is that if something goes sideways on you, oracle won't help you one bit, and since you pay a substantial chunk of money annually for that precious support, its insane NOT to use a supported platform.
I guess it depends on their mood. In various cases we raised with them on behalf of the customers, they never said get lost after we replicated it on a CentOS 5 running on VMWare in house - in both cases they have rights to say get lost. In case of CentOS , as discussed endlessly, it is not certified. For any non-Oracle-owned virtualization solution they reserve the right to say "replicate on physical hardware first". On the other hand, I can't recall a case we had which had a cause originating from the OS itself on Linux at least (AIX is a different story, there are a couple of those).
On the other hand the first nasty one will be the one you will remember! All of our Linux customers use RHEL or OEL. When they ask about CentOS, I always explain the Oracle's stand and clearly state any CentOS instance would not be supported by Oracle even though we have almost all of our in-house development instances running on it and never had a problem that didn't also happen on a RHEL environment. Once they start calculating the support costs against risk, they realize that having a valid support agreement with Oracle and RHEL actually makes sense. After you count for the Oracle licencing costs, the RHEL support becomes peanuts and since it could invalidate Oracle support, you are actually not saving any money. When the instance is just a playpen, I definitely recommend CentOS.
Still, none of this matters for v6, I think we will have to wait for Oracle 12c to come out to get OEL6 support, I am not sure about RHEL, at least w/o so-called Unbreakable Kernel malarkey.