General Guidelines for Enterprise Middleware Support

Hello everyone,

I’m writing this post on behalf of a client and banking partner to ask for some clarifications regarding the most popular enterprise middlewares (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle DB, IBM DB2, etc…).

I haven’t found a section on this topic on the official documentation, I apologize if there is one and I haven’t seen it.

Of course, certified support must be specified by the individual vendor.
However, is there a general guideline in this regard on which Enterprise middlewares are supported as well as on RHEL?

For example, a couple of points on which I would kindly ask you for clarification or confirmation:

  • All middlewares that are compatible with RHEL are also compatible with Rocky Linux as they are the same codebase
  • A list of middleware that we can consider supported on Rocky Linux is composed of multiple points such as: They are the products present within the YUM/DNF repo, the tools compatible with RHEL, the tools that run using execution environments such as the JVM (for example Weblogic) and finally the products (present and not present in the repo) that the vendors themselves declare to be compatible with Rocky Linux (for this point obviously the vendor contact is necessary)

Many thanks in advance to anyone who can help us clarify these issues!

This is entirely based on the vendor of the application. There is no general guideline. If an application is built to run on RHEL, then it should work on Rocky Linux.

It is common for users to run something made for RHEL on Rocky Linux. However, it may not be “officially supported” by the vendor this way. For example, Oracle is known for not supporting anything other than RHEL or Oracle Linux for things such as WebLogic and Oracle DB, even though their applications will work just fine when the installer is provided a “switch” to allow unsupported distributions.

The bottom line: It is up to the customer to talk with the vendor to get that sort of “certified” support.

This is generally the case. Using postgresql as the example:

  • They provide packages they’ve built on Rocky Linux and not RHEL, but is presented to work on both. It will be supported by their community.
  • We (Rocky Linux) provide our own postgresql packages much like RHEL does, but there is no guarantee that the postgresql community will support it. You will, however, receive community support here.

There are many more examples, such as Oracle DB, IBM DB2 which are not part of our repositories and is up to the user to determine if the application will work and/or if it’s supported. In these cases, we recommend the user to reach out to their support contact with those vendors.

  • Whatever is in our repositories are supported by the community here. This means anything you see in dnf in our base repositories.
  • If a tool that is outside of our repositories is compatible with RHEL, it is likely compatible with Rocky Linux. We cannot guarantee this ourselves and it will be up to the individual user to assess this. If the tool is in our repositories, it will have community support here.
  • If a vendor declares any compatibility with Rocky Linux for an application that is outside of our repositories, then you will need to work with them for any kind of support.

There is no set of guidelines for what you’re asking for. It is up to the individual vendors to specify what they do and do not support when it comes to Rocky Linux.

Packages that we ship in our base repositories are community supported only; there is no “official” or “certified” support from the project. These packages may not be supported by their individual communities or vendors and it is up to the user to determine what works and does not work for them.

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