Oracle Support Documents Underline Reasons to Choose SLES 11 for Oracle Installations

Oracle Support recently released two documents describing Oracle’s support policy with respect to ASMLib and OCFS2 on RHEL 6:

• Oracle Doc ID 1089399.1: ”For RHEL 6, Oracle will only provide ASMLib software and updates via Unbreakable Linux Network (ULN). Oracle will no longer provide ASMLib packages for Red Hat kernels.”
• Oracle Doc ID 1253272.1: “Starting with RHEL 6, Oracle will provide OCFS2 software via ULN only. ULN requires an Oracle Linux support subscription, even for those customers using OCFS2 just to store database files.”

Note that these “My Oracle Support” documents apply to RHEL 6 only. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 includes ASMLib and OCFS2 is available in the SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extensions, so SLES 11 is not affected by Oracle’s policy as described in the documents. In fact, the documents simply highlight key reasons that SLES 11 is the best platform for running key Oracle applications.

Details of ASMLib and OCFS2 support in SLES 11:

ASMLib – The ASMLib kernel module is included in SLES 11, so no extra download is required. Other required user space support packages are available to download free of cost ( http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/linux/downloads/sles11-099661.html ).

OCFS2 – OCFS2 is fully supported in the SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability extensions for SLES 11.