Oracle announced today that Dell and HP will certify and resell all Oracle operating systems – Solaris, Oracle Enterprise Linux and Oracle VM – on their x86 server systems.

According to this post by Joerg Moellenkamp, Oracle Premier Support for Solaris on HP servers is once again available, with purchase options through HP and directly from Oracle as well. HP’s Solaris Support Matrix is here.

It seems a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth could have been avoided if someone at Oracle had just said “We’re reworking the OEM agreements, give us a month or two.”

According to this Register article, IBM is ceasing sales of Solaris 10 on its x86-64 hardware as of August 27th. It is not clear at this time whether Oracle has pulled IBM’s OEM license (as it did with HP), or if IBM is making this change on its own. Dell is now the only remaining third-party vendor of Solaris on x86 hardware.

A member of the SunHELP Rescue list details in this mailing list post his attempts to purchase a license for Solaris 10 from Oracle.

If you want to purchase a Solaris 10 license (which is NOT the same as a Support Contract), all you have to do is buy a Solaris 10 “Media Pack”.

“The Solaris 10 license is bundled into the media pack (it is on a component CD). Therefore, this license comes free with the media pack purchase. While the agreement text is a little confusing, the moment you receive the media pack and open it, you will no longer be operating under trial terms.”