Oracle Linux Reviews

It’s a good product. It’s Linux.

Oracle Linux is Red Hat Linux is Linux. It is a good and evolving platform that is an excellent base for today’s world where uptime and commodity hardware are the expected norm.

Linux is a cost effective substitute for Unix.

Support could be improved.

I have been using Oracle Linux for over five years.

Of course, we have had stability issues. Linux is a work in progress.

We have not had any scalability issues.

I rate technical support 3/5. The support for Oracle Linux is effective for less difficult problems. We had problems with support when an engineering level of review was required; Oracle basically said they couldn’t help.

We were using Red Hat Linux. We went to Oracle because of licensing problems. We went back to Red Hat because of support problems.

Setup is somewhat complex. It’s Linux.

Oracle Linux saves money, but it is at the expense of support.

We evaluated Red Hat Linux.

Support for difficult problems is lacking.

The most valuable aspect of Oracle's flavor of Linux is that there's a one-stop shop for support to which I can go. I can get support for our Oracle basket of products that includes Linux and Database.

I like that it can run on generic hardware, which is definitely a plus over the proprietary hardware that we had on previous Oracle installations. This mean that we have a tremendous cost savings when we're able to run Linux on hardware for which we don't have to pay a premium. We'd rather spend our money on the software.

There are some features that might be in Red Hat Linux that aren't in Oracle Linux. I can't think of anything specific, but we had that issue about a month ago.

It's deployed just fine for us. We've had no real issues there.

It's been very stable. We've very rarely had any issues with instability.

It's been scaling just fine for what our needs are.

The support is pretty good. There are some issues with first-level support providing just basic, generally not-very-helpful advice, but they're generally responsive and help us to resolve smaller issues.

The initial setup is straightforward, if you know what you're doing. It's not that difficult or unnecessarily complex, but you should have some experience with previous installations for best results.

We implemented it ourselves with our in-house team.

Be sure you follow the instructions for installation, setup, and configuration.

We are a system integrator from Slovenia and we work extensively with OVM and Linux products.

Definitely price. And when it comes to OVM, apart from License benefits, we see that it's possible to monitor all Oracle products across the Oracle infrastructure with one product, Oracle Enterprise Manager, in combination with OVM Manager. To have a single source of truth, that is really, really valuable for us.

I think there is always room for improvement. We would like to see new features, we would like to see lots of enhancements, especially in OVM, because Linux is already stable enough and for us it does the job.

In OVM, I think it's hot cloning. I think it's also more analytical capabilities, reporting could be significantly improved, and also SLI dashboards, so that we can follow and monitor SLI more precisely and more profoundly.

Linux is stable. OVM could be better but it's still stable enough to do day-to-day operations.

Yes it's scalable, but we don't have a big installation. We only have four physical servers with two OVM server pools, so it's not really a very extensive installation. We don't see any projects on the horizon that will extend this to a large scale but, so far so good, we are happy with it.

Support is good, we have OVM support and Linux support. OVM support, especially, has proved to be very valuable because they provide us with code and scripts that are already developed for other customers. Otherwise, it would take a couple of days or even a week to develop on our own. In this way, we share the knowledge that was acquired by Oracle at other customers' sites and that's really great, it cuts the time needed to do the job.

Linux is a 10 out of 10. I would say that it's very affordable, that it's very stable, it has a great community behind it, and it's also very scalable and it performs really, really well. Up-time could be two to three years, which is unbelievable compared to the Windows world, for example.

By far, the most valuable feature of Oracle Linux is the fact that the unbreakable UEK kernel is optimized to run Oracle databases. Basically out of the box, the kernel parameters are automatically set up for I/O, for memory, and for performance.

Benefits of Oracle Linux for a lot of customers include things like Ksplice, for example, the ability to perform online kernel patches with zero downtime. In fact, a lot of the other vendors like Red Hat and SUSE are starting to embrace that technology, but they’re years behind.

Overall, Oracle Linux is full of great features and functionality. Because it is an Oracle product, what would be nice is if there better integration between the Linux operating system and Oracle ASM and things like ASMLib and the integration with Oracle RAC.

From a stability perspective, Linux has been around for decades, and Oracle Linux is going to be around for a long, long time, and it’s going to be a dominant player.

It is a derivative of Red Hat, but for all practical purposes, it’s immensely scalable, especially as you're talking about doing multi-node clusters with Oracle Linux. There are numerous customers who are leveraging Oracle RAC on Oracle Linux, that’s a very common platform for a lot for customers today. 

A lot of customers who are on Red Hat, for example - it’s all pricing. Again, this is another key benefit of being on Oracle Linux. If you buy Oracle hardware, for example, be it x86 or ODA or even Exadata, all those platforms will run on Oracle Linux, but because you're paying annual support for the hardware, you will automatically get free support on Oracle Linux. That’s by far, probably, the biggest benefit of going on Oracle Linux. 

If you compare also from cost of support of Red Hat versus Oracle Linux, Oracle Linux is going to be a lot cheaper overall.

When selecting a vendor, the cool thing about Oracle Linux is that the customers are going to be running an Oracle database on it. At the same time, if they’re going to be running Oracle databases on top of Oracle Linux, you have one vendor to call for support, you have one vendor to choke at the end of the day if things go wrong.

It's a 10 out of 10. You are going to get great support from Oracle Linux. The portal that you would log into for support for Oracle Linux is going to be the same portal that you would log into to get your database support. It will be the same portal that you log into to get your Exadata and ODA if you're running those hardware appliances as well.

We are using Oracle Linux for our database.

Oracle Linux is very secure making it one of the most valuable features. Additionally, it is easy to manage.

Oracle Linux could improve by having more documentation.

I have been using Oracle Linux for approximately 12 years.

The solution is highly stable.

We have approximately 100 users using this solution in my organization.

The initial setup is straightforward because there are a lot of documents available to follow.

I rate Oracle Linux a nine out of ten.

Docker containers allow you to deploy a lot of workloads at scale. If you can think of the old batch jobs, what they do is allow us to deploy that into the cloud so we can elastically expand or contract and only pay for what we use. I think that's part of it.

You have high availability, so you can run your containers in multiple availability zones. They're very cost-effective, much more cost-effective than writing your own scripts. And they're layered so they're very lightweight; they don't consume quite as many resources as how we would traditionally deploy this.

I would really like to see more frequent releases and I would like to see a very lightweight kernel for embedded systems. I'm really anticipating the new Oracle Database XE as it relates to Oracle Linux because now I can run that in production, and that was just announced as well.

It's young, so I think it's fair that they have some work to do. A little bit more variability, the ability to expand, take advantage of bare metal. I think that that's really going to be a key as they grow.

The Oracle container engine is actually built on the Enterprise Linux kernel. So I think it's extremely stable and secure. I think it's one of the most stable and secure Linux variants in the world. When we actually build our Docker containers we utilize Oracle Linux as a basis for those as well.

I think what's great about it is if you're a small customer you can install Oracle Linux, just pull it down off of the site, update it. And if you're a large customer you can go with the unbreakable kernel. You can run that on on-premise, and when you go to the cloud which, of course, is scaled out to literally millions of nodes, it's the basis for all of Oracle's cloud.

What's great is having the Oracle Linux, also having Oracle products. You've really goy one vendor to call. Some people like to say one neck to choke but I say one hand to high-five.

You might have a development team that kind of runs off and goes rogue and installs several different operating systems. Or they've assembled a Docker container and deployed it in the Cloud under the guise of microservices. The first time you have a hiccup with that, or the credit card doesn't process and you don't know where to find the code or the developer, I think at that point you really need to put some controls in place.

When it comes to important criteria when selecting a vendor, I think experience is there, but they really have to care. They have to own the problems; I think owning your client's problems is the number one thing.

What is most valuable is that it's supported by Oracle. It's performing, we are not facing any performance problems. Of course, it's open source, so we are saving on the licensing costs that we have when using with other proprietary license software.

At the end of the day, we are getting Oracle performance in the optimal manner with a Linux operating system, which we had before, but in a different flavor.

I think the biggest benefit that we have is cost savings. That's what the company is looking for at this point. We don't have to spend a high amount of licensing costs on the previous solution that we were using with the HPE operating system. Now, we are on the Linux flavor, which is open source, as I said, and it saves us a lot of money on licensing.

It is fully supported by Oracle. If we look at the certification matrix on the Oracle MOS (My Oracle Support) site, Oracle is supporting it, all the features are supported. We are using Linux HugePages with it, which saves us a lot of money for memory. We are defining our memory using Linux HugePages for growing our system in global areas, which is helpful for performance. Those are the few features I can think of off top of my head at this point.

It's pretty stable. We haven't seen any major problems so far. If we have issues, then we have to open an open source ticket with Red Hat. And they do resolve those, with solutions, but so far we haven't seen any roadblocks.

The set up is basically Linux servers, and we have Oracle Database 12.1.0.2 running there. Non-RAC, but a Data Guard environment, where we have a primary instance set up, and that application is done on the standby. The primary and the standby are running on Oracle Red Hat Linux, actually.

I would say, from my experience, that you need to make sure that all the features you are using are compatible with the OS version, the Oracle version that you are going for.

So far, we haven't seen any problems, it is fully certified with Oracle, and all the features are working without any issues, it is very performant. You can go for it as long as all your features are supported with this operating system.

We are very happy.

We use this solution for deploying and managing operating systems and web servers. It is good for web, network, and file management.

The ease of deployment is very valuable because the deployment process is straightforward to manage.

The documentation capabilities could be better. Although it is sufficient, other solutions provide better documentation. 

We have been using this solution for two years and have used a variety of versions.

The solution is stable and we have no issues with it.

The solution is scalable, and it is easy to patch.

We have no experience with customer service and support. 

The initial setup was straightforward. However, it may be more challenging to set up for people with no experience.

I rate this solution a seven out of ten because there can be improvements to the documentation capabilities and the communities around them.