Infrastructure Software

Dear all,

I have a couple of questions about the OUL support program. I should probably contact our sales rep, but sometimes I'm not in the mood for a sales pitch :) (Only kidding, our sales rep is good)

Which Red Hat release/update levels are supported under OUL? The documentation and the information I got from my Oracle contact seem to differ. Our sales rep said that the following are supported:

Release 3, Update 8 and upwards
Release 4, Update 4 and upwards

However, the documentation seems to say that the following are supported

Release 3, Update 9 and upwards
Release 4, Update 4 and upwards

This is important as our current RHEL installs are at R3U8 and R4U4 (of course!)

Oracle state that they will support a Red Hat release for five years after the release date. Are these timeframes for support based on the 'Base' release date or the 'Update' release date? For instance, the Base release date for RHEL 3 was October 2003 when RHEL3 first came out. However, RHEL 3, Update 9 was released in June 2007. Assuming that we were running RHEL3, Update, does the five years last from 2003 to 2008 or from 2007 to 2012?

I heard that it's possible for us to subscribe to the Oracle Partner Network and obtain 'free' licenses for our non-Production databases. Is this same possible for OUL? We have a number of RHEL servers which are for test, QA, development, etc and we are paying for all of these under our Red Hat support.

TIA!