No, they need to be the same version.
The provision wizard looks for same version OS, it will not find other versions. The OS check does not validate the patches, if Oracle does not require the patch, then it is not needed.
Essentially you need to be able to provision a VDB to the Staging Server. As long as those requirements are met you will be fine. One thing to note is that when Delphix provisions the staging VDB, it does so with the default configuration of the container that it is provisioned from. This means that the staging server should be able to accommodate the specified db configuration params that are specified by default. If not, an easy workaround is to provision a VDB with the desired parameters and to XPP from it.
The versions do need to match.
The PPT must match the source and target must be Linux. Currently we only support Unix to Linux
