The age old question of migrating from one OS to another is upon me. I'm currently on Solaris 11 SRU3 and love the ZFS and not having to partition drives. The Boss wants to stop paying those high Oracle service contract fees so I'm charged with finding an alternative. I have used SuSe 11 in production but never RH. Only used RH at home. The server will host Oracle 11 and eventually 12 so who has experience with RH 6 or 7 with Oracle and how painful was it?
I'm not particularly biased towards either RH or SuSe but I did like YAST for managing when not on the CLI.

erj

Red Hat has a free 30 day trial version and after that you need to pay a subscription fee. If you don't pay the fees, you are not able to get updates or install software from their repositories. I don't know how it compares to Oracle but your best source of information is obviously the Red Hat site. CentOS is the free version of Red Hat with support coming from the community and forums.

In addition to the above, Oracle do a rebuild of RHEL, but I believe its not free (ie same arrangement as RHEL).
Qn is, do you feel confident doing your own support.

Also, if you really like ZFS, take a look here http://zfsonlinux.org/

You could take a look at FreeBSD as well since you like ZFS. You also may want to look into OpenIndiana as well. OpenIndiana might have some compatibility with Solaris packages as well. It too supports ZFS well. The binary compatibility might help with migrations.

Both of those are free open source operating systems as well.