ColdFusion 2021 vs. 2023, RHEL8 and RHEL9, Oracle 19 vs. 21

FWIW, you can run CF2021 Enterprise easily using Docker. That's the way we run it on RHEL. Makes updates a piece of cake. Adobe provides the docker images on docker hub (https://hub.docker.com). That might help with your testing/evaluation needs.

-dB

CF2023 apparently only supports RHEL 9.1+, is this actually the case, it does NOT support RHEL 8.x ?

By @C301495593kjw

Yes.

ColdFusion 2023 does NOT support RHEL 8.x.

It supports RHEL 9.1 or later. That is a System Requirement for ColdFusion 2023 Enterprise and ColdFusion 2023 Standard:

You will notice that the requirement doesn't start at RHEL 9.0, but at RHEL 9.1. That tells me that ColdFusion 2023 may be using new features that are present in RHEL 9.1 or later, but not in RHEL 9.0. Let alone RHEL 8.x.

There are quite a number of such new features. See for example:

https://computingforgeeks.com/rhel-8-vs-rhel-9-comparison-table/ 

https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/9 

Red Hat is kind of weird compared to other Linux distros, so none of the RHEL stuff would surprise me a bit. I would try to live without Adobe support for Oracle 21c, and use Oracle's own support instead, along with Oracle's own drivers installed as "other" instead of using the DataDirect drivers. I honestly don't know if it will work better than the DataDirect drivers, but it'll probably be good enough and you can use Oracle's support instead.

You should be able to find CF 2021 at the CFML Repo.

https://www.cfmlrepo.com/

It looks like @Charlie Arehart uploaded CF 2021 back in February 2021.

Dave Watts, Eidolon LLC

No word to explain why Adobe testing and the new release docs would stop at those versions, but I will offer some other thoughts that may help you.

1) First, as for the Oracle db version, note that that's listed for CF Enterprise only. Does it mean those using CF Standard can't use Oracle? No: just that they must obtain the free Oracle JDBC driver and implement it in the cf admin as an "other jdbc" driver. And someone then running cf enterprise could do that also.

But what I'm getting at is that Adobe never formally lists or limits what db's or versions that "other" driver approach does or does not "support". Many find they can use versions (older and newer) which are not listed in those cf support matrix docs. Indeed, others find they can even use cf's built-in db drivers also with db versions not listed. 

I realize that may not satisfy some who feel they must stay within "what the vendor supports", but others will be encouraged by this possiblity to at least try things to see how they may go. 

2) Similarly, when Adobe lists what OS versions they support, the main focus is what they've tested. Just because a version is not listed (older or newer) doesn't mean YOUR app WON'T run on that, though perhaps it MAY NOT work, so again testing will tell.

More than that, the indicator of OS version may be more about what version the cf INSTALLER will work on. In the past, some have worked around such installer issues and then found cf to "work fine" on an unlisted OS version.

YMMV and this is not the formal answer, but it's an alternative one to consider. Let's see if others, especially Adobe, may have more to say.