What Oracle versions are supported and on what OS with the ECX Oracle Solution?

Question

What Oracle versions are supported and on what OS with the ECX Oracle Solution?

Answer

Oracle Requirements
Database Versions/Types	Server Types	Operating Systems	Storage Configuration	Storage Systems
Oracle 11gR2 or 12c [1] configured as: Standalone on ASM or File Systems [2, 3] RAC on ASM [2, 3, 4, 5]	Physical [6]	AIX 6.1 TL9+ [8] AIX 7.1+ [8]	Fibre Channel iSCSI	IBM Spectrum Virtualize Software 7.3 and later: o       IBM SAN Volume Controller o       IBM Storwize o       IBM FlashSystem V9000 IBM Spectrum Accelerate 11.5.3 and later:         o    IBM FlashSystem A9000/A9000R o       IBM XIV storage systems Pure Storage running Pure APIs 1.5 and above : o FlashArray//m o FlashArray 4xx series
		Red Hat Enterprise Linux/Centos/Oracle 6.5+ [9] Red Hat Enterprise Linux/Centos/Oracle 7.0+ [9] SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11.0 SP4+ [9] SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12.0+ [9]	Fibre Channel iSCSI
	Virtual (VMware) [6, 7, 10, 11]	Red Hat Enterprise Linux/Centos/Oracle 6.5+ [9] Red Hat Enterprise Linux/Centos/Oracle 7.0+ [9] SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11.0 SP4+ [9] SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12.0+ [9]	Physical RDM backed by Fibre Channel or iSCSI disks attached to ESX VMDK (dependent as well as independent disks) on VMFS datastores backed by Fibre Channel or iSCSI disks attached to ESX iSCSI disks directly attached to guest operating system

Notes:

1. For Oracle 12c multitenant databases, ECX supports protection and recovery of the container database (including all pluggable databases under it). Granular recovery of specific PDBs can be performed via Instant Access recovery combined with RMAN.
2. Standalone databases protected by ECX can be recovered to the same or another standalone instance. RAC databases protected by ECX can be recovered to the same or another RAC. ECX does not support recovery of databases from a standalone system to a RAC or vice versa.
3. Oracle DataGuard is not supported.
4. Oracle Flex ASM is not supported.
5. RAC database recoveries are not server pool-aware. ECX can recover databases to a RAC but not to specific server pools.
6. ECX supports recovering databases from a source physical server to a destination virtual server by provisioning disks as physical RDMs. Similarly, ECX can recover databases from a source virtual server that uses physical RDM to a destination physical server. However, source databases on VMDK virtual disks can only be recovered to another virtual server and not to a physical server.
7. ECX does not support VADP-based protection of virtual Oracle servers. Oracle data must reside directly on one of the supported storage systems listed above.
8. On AIX LPAR/VIO servers, Oracle data must reside on disks attached to the server using NPIV. Virtual SCSI disks are not supported.
9. Linux LVM volumes containing Oracle data must use LVM version 2.02.118 or above. On SLES 11 SP4, this version of LVM may not be available through the official repositories in which case databases running on or recovered to SLES 11 SP4 systems must use ASM or non-LVM filesystems only.
10. Masking and DevOps recoveries are not supported on virtual servers.
11. See System Requirements in the Online Help for supported VMware vSphere versions.

Note:  Oracle database data and the flash recovery area (FRA) must reside on supported storage systems. ECX can back up archived logs to a supported storage system if they are not already on one.
For Oracle RAC clustered nodes running prior to vSphere 6.0, virtual machines cannot use a virtual SCSI controller whose SCSI Bus Sharing option is set to None. This is required to ensure that ECX can hot-add shared virtual disks to the cluster nodes. For vSphere 6.0 and above, this requirement does not apply. Instead, if an existing shared SCSI controller is not found on vSphere 6.0 and above, ECX automatically enables the "multi-writer" sharing option for each shared virtual disk.