Recently there has been quite some discussion around the support for OCFS2. SUSE has published their support statements in two blog entries:
- the first one from November 2nd talks mainly about Linux on System z support
- the second one from November 4th is a more general support statement
So the good news is that there will be continued support for a shared file system integrated in the SUSE distribution. SUSE support will require the installation of the High Availability Extensions (HAE) that are included for Linux on System z and POWER.
So it’s best to view OCFS2 as a cluster file system that has been created by Oracle. Don’t get confused with the Oracle DB itself. If Oracle RAC is a requirement, you are not dependent on OCFS2 – Oracle ASM is in my opinion better integrated with the Oracle DB and should be used.