Problems in Heterogeneous Setup

I am not in a hetro-geneous setup.

But a similar installation I have already visited, which one of the big installation in Bangalore, they used Sun solaris as dev and HP UX as PRD. But no problems. Logically SAP system just looks for where the data is stored and works on TCP/IP. It just does not matter where the database resides for development and production.

The transport mechanism just transports from the development client to productive client. So I assure you 100% you can plan this. This is supported by SAP.

You can even plan NT as development machine. It just works fine.

But some advantages are available if you have similar systems.

1. When updating patches for a particular os/db combination , you have a chance to see how it works, before trying
it on productive system.

2. You learn a lot on installation, sizing, many other related issues at the time of development, so that you can easily
sort it our at the time of installation of prd system.

The above cannot be told as advantageous, but take a note of these. After all it is a matter of cost + convenience!

I am on NT + SQL Server with SAP 4.7 Ent. and its works fantastic without any problems.