ESRI product teams have a policy of supporting hardware, operating system, compilers, RDBMS versions, and Web servers. We refer to this collective technology as an environment. Our base support level is the environment in which we build and release the product. In addition, we support many other subsequent releases of hardware, operating systems, RDBMSs, etc. Environments with components that are older than what we originally built the product on are not supported.
As a part of our normal work, we do test our software releases on select environments. However, due to the large number of possible environments, we cannot directly test all of them. An environment is certified as supported when the product's quality assurance and quality certification (QA/QC) tests run successfully.
Non-certification of an environment does not necessarily mean it is not supported. That environment is supported if it meets or exceeds the base build environment and that environment is known to not fail. Environments that are known to not work are usually documented on the product support page as soon as that information is available.
An environment may be supported even if there are some known issues with the software on that particular environment. Any known issues will be documented in the "limitations" section of the System Requirements for that environment.
Support of an environment means ESRI will do everything reasonably possible to support and correct problems. Some problems are not solvable by ESRI (for example, RDBMS bugs, operating system bugs, Web server bugs, or compiler incompatibilities). Sometimes ESRI's support of a site will require the site to upgrade the environment. If no other reasonable alternative is available, and ESRI cannot fix the problem, we may provide a patch. Patches will be provided using our existing methods for building and releasing patched software.
ESRI cannot support any environment not supported by the vendors of the operating systems, RDBMSs, or Web servers.