Oracle on Windows 2008? A no-no!

Two days ago Microsoft released a Release Candidate 0 (RC0) of Windows 2008 Server - codenamed 'Longhorn'. The official date of launch is February 27, 2008 (in 153 days), so there is still 5 months of work to be done. Out of curiosity and to compare the performance against 5 years old Windows 2003 server I downloaded and installed this RC0. And since at that time I had one 'free' Itanium based server, I decided to try the IA64 build.

The installation is quite fast, within 30 minutes I had working system ready for experiments.

The server had no problems joining existing Windows 2003 domain, didn't even require and Active Directory updates, and even the group policies were applied properly (remote desktop, user account rights, etc.)

Then I tried to install our favorite software, Oracle 10g R2 database. I was curious if there will be any issues with Windows 2008. I immediately recalled the problem we had few months ago when we purchased the brand new server equipped with dual core Montecito processors and spend days trying to install Oracle on it. Out of desperation we checked Oracle's  MetaLink support site and there it was - in order to succeed in installation, you have to install special Montecito Java patch and then you can proceed with 'normal' installation.

Will it be the same with Windows 2008 Server? No! It is even worse… but it simply won't work and reports the same error:

Hard to say if it is Microsoft, Oracle or Sun to be blamed, but with the recent Montecito patch in mind I would say that there is something rotten in the java runtime.

Update: same error shows up on x86 build as well, even when installing the Vista-ready-already-patched-to-10.2.0.3.0 database release. I wonder if Oracle will even support 10g on Windows 2008 or just force customers to migrate to 11g release.