I'd say as long as this is patched with official patches from Red Hat, this should be indistinguishable to SAP. Question is if this is possible, not sure if RH patches carry a signature?
"As Oracle is going to provide their own patches for Oracle Unbreakable Linux, future compatibility to Red Hat Enterprise Linux is not assured.
Supporting Oracle Unbreakable Linux, Oracle Enterprise Linux or Oracle VM would then require a complete new certification by SAP, as hard- and software certifications prior conducted on Red Hat Enterprise Linux cannot be transfered to Oracle Unbreakable Linux by default.
Therefore SAP recommends using one of the already certified Linux distributions and their support offering (see note 171356 for more details), as there are currently no plans to support Oracle Unbreakable Linux for running SAP software on Linux."
<END SNIP>
Third parties can recompile the Red Hat source release but it is no longer a Red Hat package. The Red Hat subscription and support model is based on the binary bits shipped by Red Hat and is described here:
If an external party rebuilds the source for the Red Hat operating system, then it is no longer supported by Red Hat and does not meet the qualification with software and hardware partners.
All the Red Hat rpm packages are signed with Red Hat keys. The rpm headers "rpm -qi <pkg>" will also provide a hash for the packages binary contents.
Note 997990 explicitly refers to Oracle's unbreakable Linux. As I am not the author of the note, I cannot simply make the transfer work and claim that the note applies to the scenario described by you. Note 784391 also has some sections that seem to apply, at least partially. What makes it tricky is that, when writing these notes; we never had a situation in mind where one of our certified Linux vendors would offer support for the other vendor's certified distrbution. Look's like we have some homework to do and eliminate the ambiguities which have emerged because of this situation unforeseen by us.
What would concern me most as a customer around all of this is that it opens up a lot of questions whther it does (or does not?) invalidate SAP certification. As being Sox compliant etc. is of utmost importance to all of our customers, certification is a very sensitive topic requiring full clarification. Although I am involved a lot in certification activities around SAP on Linux, I don't feel in a postion to call such a version of RHEL patched by Novell either "SAP certified" or "Not certified by SAP". All I can tell is that our customer usually insist on using fully certified components inside of their SAP landscapes, at least when it comes to production envirnments.
Interesting... they offer that as a "migration path" to go to SuSE.
You may get patches but I'm unsure if they provide you also with priority support. To ensure I'd open an OSS call and ask the Novell guys directly (component BC-OP-LNX-SUSE)
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