De-support dates for SOA Suite 10g

15 Jan 2012 by Simon Haslam (in General)  |  Comments (2)

Yesterday, Lonneke Dikmans, one of the managing partners at Vennster, and fellow collaborator on various things, asked if I knew when support ended on Oracle SOA Suite 10g. For middleware admins, who may not be familiar with the 10g version of SOA Suite, this is primarily BPEL Process Manager and Oracle Enterprise Service Bus, running on the OC4J J2EE application server (iAS/OAS).

You often see de-support dates in Oracle presentations, but there hasn't been an UKOUG App Server & Middleware SIG for a while and so I couldn't remember - I just knew it was a year or two after the main iAS de-support date. The general app. server support dates are shown below (see later for where this table comes from):

Firstly though, let's recap what I think the types of support equate to (you can get an official definition from Oracle's website):

• "Premier Support": this is what I'd call "normal" support and costs 22% of the product's perpetual licence list price. An analyst will help you 24/7 for Priority 1 service requests, and during business hours otherwise. It also includes what Oracle used to call "Updates", namely the right to upgrade your software (either with patchsets or to the next main version, like 10g to 11g). During the Premier Support period Oracle produces bug fixes covering both product faults and security vulnerabilities.
• "Extended Support": this usually is available after the Premier Support period ends, costs you another 20% of your previous support bill, and Oracle will provide support and bug fixes, primarily for security vulnerabilities.
• "Sustaining Support": this is after Extended Support has finished - I'm not quite sure what this costs. During this period no new fixes are developed (security or otherwise) but Oracle Support will try to help you resolve issues, perhaps advising you to apply pre-existing patches. The unkind might call this the "money for old rope" option.
  

Cost aside, you really want to run all your systems on versions that are covered by Premier Support. Once you start getting into Extended and Sustaining Support periods in my experience, for example with Oracle Reports, I have found it hard to get appropriately skilled Oracle Support analysts (as the experienced ones have probably been moved to newer products, as is Oracle's prerogative). The exception to this rule tends to be the database - if you have a mature and very stable system, that is not undergoing much application change, the chances are that you've already hit, and resolved, any bugs you're likely to. It's not unusual for organisations to have a few of these back-end systems that don't justify upgrading - they will simply get replaced entirely by something new in a few years. I still have customers with plenty of 9.2.0.7 databases, and occasionally see the odd 8.1.7.4 one. I haven't seen 7.3.4 for some time but don't doubt there are still a few around!

Overall I tend to think of Premier Support as "supported", and anything else as "de-supported".

So, back to SOA Suite 10g... after some digging around for support dates in My Oracle Support I eventually found this document out on oracle.com:

Oracle Lifetime Support Policy - Oracle Fusion Middleware

This 67 page PDF document, last updated in December 2011, covers every product you can think of from both Oracle, and the raft of acquired companies. There are two tables of interest to this SOA question, which I have copied here for convenience, the first is the general app. server one at the top of this article, but the SOA specific one is:

(that's my highlighting in orange)

Analysis

So, the important information is for Oracle SOA Suite 10.1.3.x the end of Premier support is 31 December 2013 and Extended Support is 31 Dec 2014. Note: if you want to sure of support you really need to do an audit of what versions and patch levels of the operating system and JVM you are running too - some components may need updating.

The ** footnote indicates that this support covers BPEL PM, ESB, etc on both Oracle Containers for J2EE (OC4J, i.e. iAS 10.1.3) and Oracle WebLogic Server. You may not be aware but, sometime around the middle of last year I think, Oracle announced that SOA 10g was certified to run on WebLogic Server 11g (10.3.5.1 then, but I haven't checked to see if that has moved on).

Given that the upgrade of BPEL in SOA 10g to the new SOA 11g running on the SCA platform is quite difficult due to the change in approach, this long support period for 10g will be very welcome for Oracle SOA early adopters. Whilst I don't have any customers who have done this yet, I think the option of moving SOA 10g to WebLogic is well worth considering too. This would allow you to run both 10g and 11g environments side by side, using the same hardware and licences, thus allowing a gradual migration over maybe 6 months or so, perhaps one set of business processes at a time. It would also move your entire SOA infrastructure onto WebLogic so simplifying administration of both production and test environments, and saving new administrators from having to get up to speed with OC4J.

Anyway, whilst this post is mainly an aide-memoire for myself, I hope it might be useful to other Oracle SOA admins. If you are in the position of running SOA 10g in production you may well benefit from getting in touch with someone like Lonneke (who practically lives and breathes SOA) to work out the most effective way for you to get from 10g to 11g (or maybe even 12c which could be available in the next year).