What is needed to go p*production* with Oracle on Linux? (Was: Oracle + SLES-7)

Hi all, 

(cc the announce mailinglist since this might be of interest: See below,  
"What's needed for going production with Linux&Oracle")

I repeat again, we strongly recommend SLES-8 instead of SLES-7, which is a 
FREE upgrade for any (SLES-7) SuSE Maintenance customer (and if you're not 
our customer, well...). SLES-7 is not part of the Oracle "Unbreakable Linux" 
initiative and therefore significantly less well-tested under load - and to 
fix any such issues in SLES-7 when we provide the upgrade to SLES-8 for FREE 
(to current *customers*), what for? 


To go "production" on Oracle on Linux, you should have 

1) A Linux that's part of the Oracle campaign "Unbreakable Linux", e.g. SLES-8
2) A current maintenance contract with the OS vendor, that's SuSE
3) An Oracle support contract (which will also take care of any OS issues!) 

If you don't have an "Unbreakable Linux" Linux you'll have a much less 
well-tested Linux, plus there's a lower level of support for it. And if you 
run into serious issues you WILL be pointed to the free upgrade option (to 
SLES-8). 

If you don't have a maintenance contract with SuSE you will not be able to get 
patches/patchsets for your system (Patching or changing it yourself will 
invalidate any certification. Even if you're Oracle support customer but have 
NO SuSE maintenance contract you will be unable to get any OS patches!)

If you don't have an Oracle support contract you will have to rely on Internet 
resources like the [email protected] mailinglist or OTN forums for help - 
which does indeed help with simple installation issues, but it is almost 
certainly of little use if there is some issue that requires elaborate 
testing and simulation of your particular workload/setup. For problems like 
"my system freezes under heavy load after 1 month when I do backup" (I just 
invented this for illustration, okay?), the only reliable way to get help is 
through Oracle support! The Linux OS vendor, SuSE in this case, does not have 
the resources to investigate this issue. 

Actually, we do, but we spend it on LINUX and not on Oracle - our partnership 
with Oracle includes that Oracle solves Oracle problems, and SuSE solves 
Linux problems! That means that Oracle support gets those issues FIRST, and 
only if they determine it's an OS issue they escalate to us - which is 
invisible to the customer since you will keep talking to Oracle support only, 
and also get your solution from there. 


This process as outlined above is for *production* systems, to get help 
*reliably* and for sure. Of course we continue to try to help with any of 
your issues e..g if you post it to this list.. I just thought maybe it's a 
good idea I point out the one and only way to get 100% reliable help, before 
anyone gets frustrated after going production with any one of the 3 
components missing, okay? I don't want to see any phone calls from a very 
angry sysadmin at the SuSE hotline "our server crashed and my job is on the 
line and you didn't tell me [the above] *before* we went production" ;-) 


Regards, 
Michael 


On Friday 26 September 2003 14:16, Cesar Charcape P. wrote: 
> In my case I think it was the USB keyboard, I already changed the keyboard
> and now everything seems to be ok, but I am still testing this box because
> tonight would be starting the big job, I will import my production database
> over this server only for development testing purposes...but this will be
> very useful for me since I will try to migrate from a RISC server (an IBM
> F80 model) to a new Intel Xeon Server like the one you are using..., in
> fact I will try to get an HP DL560 for testing my new production
> environment...
>
> cchp