Oracle Linux Reviews

We are primarily using the solution for our Oracle Database.

The solution is very, very stable. The performance is reliable. 

It's very useful for hosting other Oracle products.

The solution is very scalable. You can expand it if needed.

Technical support is very good. They have been responsive and they understand the product.

The initial setup is quick and easy. It doesn't take too long.

The pricing of the solution is not too high. It's reasonable. 

The security could always be slightly improved on the product. We'd like it if it was a bit more secure.

I've been using the solution for a couple of years at this point. It's been a while. I have some experience with it at this point.

The solution is very stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's very reliable in terms of performance.

The solution is very scalable. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so with relative ease. It's not a problem.

We currently have about 50 people on the solution.

We do plan to increase the usage in the future.

Technical support is good. They are helpful and responsive. We are quite happy with the level of support we have received from them so far. They are available when we need them.

Previously, we had a mixed environment and we were using all sorts of operating systems. 

The initial setup is not overly difficult or complex. We found the process to be very straightforward. The deployment itself was fast.

We have two members of the technical team that can handle any maintenance required. 

We handled the implementation ourselves. We did not need the assistance of a consultant or implementor. 

We pay for a license on a yearly basis. It's not an overly expensive product. It's affordable.

We're using the latest version of the solution at this time.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. We're quite happy with the capabilities of the solution so far. It works as expected and does what we need it to do.

I would recommend the solution to other users and organizations. 

We use the solution for big packet inspection and as an operating system.

We like that we can use the C++ coding while working with it. 

The speed is quite good.

It's mostly very stable. 

The operating system is fine. 

It's pretty simple to setup, and we can do it in-house as it is not complex.

The solution is open-source. 

The network interface should be modernized. It's a bit out of date. 

It could be more scalable. 

We've used the solution for one project. We've used it for a few months. I haven't used it for that long just yet.

It is stable and mostly reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze on us. 

The scalability could be better. 

We have two or three people using the solution right now and do not have plans to increase usage. 

We did not use technical support. We've never had a need to reach out. I cannot speak to how helpful or responsive they would be. 

I've also used CentOS. The setup and scalability are the same as Oracle. 

The initial setup is straightforward. I haven't noticed any complexities. The deployment takes several days. It doesn't take too long. 

We have a team that handles deployment and maintenance. There are about five people and they are engineers.

We handled the setup ourselves. We did not need outside help. Our support team could easily deploy it. 

The licensing is open-source. We do not have to pay for licensing. 

We are using version nine. I cannot recall the exact version number. 

I'd recommend the solution to others.

I would rate the solution nine out of ten. 

I am not an Oracle expert, I'm a database expert. From my standpoint, Oracle Linux is more compatible with the latest open-source software than other operating systems like Ubuntu Linux and CentOS Linux. I have faced a lot of challenges with different operating systems but it turns out that other database packages are not very compatible with different operating systems. They are not very compatible with Arch and Ubuntu Linux; however, Oracle Linux is highly compatible with all of the open-source projects.

I wouldn't say that we had many major challenges with Oracle Linux. I can't say it's the most advanced operating system, but I can definitely say that they patch regularly. We didn't have major challenges with Oracle Linux, to be honest.

I have been using Oracle Linux for more than five years.

I don't think that we had any kind of stability issues. Most of the time, if I remember correctly, we worked with Oracle Linux when it was a part of the private cloud. By private cloud, I mean it was in VM. Being in VM with limited resources, sometimes the software packages would crash, but I don't recall the operating system ever crashing. The issues we experienced were due to the software and filter packages, not the operating system.

Oracle tech support is pretty well organized. They have a long history of offering support for their Oracle packages. It doesn't matter if it's an Oracle database, an Oracle operating system; they give support 24/7, covering every time zone. They have multiple experts available for every issue you could experience. They can always be reached no matter what. They are very well organized with their support.

Oracle Linux is very easy to set up.

Oracle Linux is very much compatible with other platforms. Installing VMs is very easy. If you are installing on a hard metal server, it's still very easy. I installed Oracle Linux myself, I didn't have major challenges with it.

Nowadays, Oracle is very open toward price negotiation; they negotiate well with their clients. 

If you're interested in Oracle Linux, make sure you know the infrastructure of where it's going inside and out. You have to have a clear idea of where exactly your organization is heading in the future, whether private cloud or public cloud. These decisions are not made in seconds, minutes, or even days or weeks. But you have to have a clear idea. For example, if a company wants to use Oracle Linux and they think after two or three years they might be in a hybrid cloud, or maybe a public cloud, they had to make sure they aren't too dependent on the operating system. Whatever software packages they are using should be very compatible with the existing infrastructure like a hybrid or a public cloud.

Picture two containers that are very much independent: you can implement Containerization in Oracle Linux and the same containers can and will work well in both a private cloud or a public cloud infrastructure.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Oracle Linux a rating of eight.

Because nothing is perfect, I wouldn't give any operating system or any other software packages a rating of 10. They have bugs sometimes. For some extra points, they should keep aligned with the ope-source community. Oracle is very loyal to their own customers. If a client is experiencing an issue, they will work with them until it is fully resolved. But what about the open-source community? I think they should also pay more attention to the open-source community. 

I think one of the most valuable features, I can see is Enterprise Linux. and it has been universally supported. There are some enterprise features which Oracxle added, which I don't see in any other Linux. So we recommend it to a lot of our large customers who are running their mission critical applications on Linux.

I think one of the biggest criteria I see is that customers don't have to have any downtime if they have to do patching. Patching is important because customers are running their critical applications, but there is nothing called "planned down-time" for patching. You can literally run your mission critical application, keep on doing patching in the background and I think that's the biggest feature Oracle Linux has which I don't find anywhere else. 

One of the major benefits I have seen is that a lot of customers have unsupported Linux in their datacenters. With Oracle Linux, you have the chance to standardize entirely on one Linux platform. 

The second thing is that if you're running a lot of Oracle workloads on Oracle Linux, you get universal support, you get support 24/7 from the same company -  right from your operating system to the application - and it has enterprise features. I think these are major advantages.

They added a lot of features on Oracle Linux. As a consulting company, and as somebody who's working with customers, obviously the demands from the customers are plenty.

I think they should market it more aggressively now because a lot of people think, "If I have to move from Red Hat Linux to Oracle Linux, it's a migration," when it is not. I call it a movement. You literally can move your large Red Hat Linux to Oracle Linux very simply, there's no migration involved in that. I think they should market these features more aggressively.

One of the things which customers have been asking about is what are the security features that Oracle is going to add. We do a lot of OS hardening, Linux hardening for customers, but I think there should be some tools within Linux where the hardening can be done pretty fast. Now, in this open world Larry Ellison announced, autonomous and self-secured databases, I'm sure those features will come to Linux, and we're looking forward to that.

Linux is an extremely stable platform. You implement it and you can forget it. On top of it, Oracle has added a lot of features which has made it extremely stable. We have been doing this since 2003, I have not faced any major outage at any of my customers or of any mission critical application on Oracle Linux.

The fundamental approach Oracle took in early 2000 is horizontal scaling, and Linux became an extremely important part for the horizontal scaling. We have seen large implementations on Oracle Linux which have been scaled horizontally. 

I think if a customer needs to look into a larger customer, they should look at Oracle. Oracle, themselves, must be the largest user of Oracle. The entire Oracle cloud now works on Oracle Linux so you have thousands of customers running their applications on Oracle Linux. Extremely scalable.

You have to see support from a different angle. Definitely support is good because Oracle is known for that, providing 24/7 support. But the biggest advantage you get here is that, because it's one company supporting you over the entire platform, you can actually get help from them to identify the problem, whether the problem is at the Linux level or the problem is at the database level. You don't get that when you have Linux with some different vendor and the database from a different vendor. We have not faced any problems.

For Oracle Linux, 100% binary compatibility with RHEL was very crucial (and expected since it’s obviously a derivative of RHEL).

I was also very impressed with the ability of Grid Infrastructure to provide HANFS services, as well as the ability to create a custom clustered service, which I used to implement redundant Samba shares.

The single biggest enhancement I personally witnessed came with the implementation of OCFS2 for shared filesystems. Prior to implementing this, one particular application cluster running Oracle’s UCM used an NFS share. While I no longer have the testing data available (I left the company), I can say that I/O performance increased by close to ten-fold after the change from file-level reads/writes to an NFS share to block-level reads/writes directly to SAN storage.

I have no specific technical improvements to suggest, as my experience with the various products was quite satisfactory, however I do have two non-technical suggestions:

1. My only real criticism of any the products, based on my experience, comes when dealing with ASM volumes and disk groups, and documentation of the Oracle ASM tool specifically. I felt that documentation of its capabilities were somewhat misleading, especially disk and volume tasks that must be performed either by ASMCA or by issuing SQL statements (e.g. version compatibility) to the ASM database directly.
2. In my observations, if Oracle intends Oracle Linux to be taken seriously as an enterprise operating system outside of Oracle specific implementations, I believe it could exercise more effort in partnering with other software vendors to obtain certification of their products on Oracle Linux. As someone who has performed as a Sr. Systems Engineer implementing Oracle products in an enterprise environment, I find it frustrating to maintain multiple derivatives of the same operating system (e.g. enterprise licensing and maintenance) because some vendors won’t certify on it (or were even aware of its existence), even though it’s almost technically identical. I do recognize there are other factors outside of Oracle’s control in this regard.

I have experience with Oracle Linux through v6, OCFS2, and Grid Infrastructure 12c with ASM for RAC implementations, HANFS, and customized clustered services.

There are various lengths of time. I have managed Oracle Linux installations for approx. seven years, OCFS2 for approx. three years, and Grid Infrastructure with ASM for approx. two years.

We had no issues with the deployment.

We have had no issues with the stability.

We have had no issues scaling it for our needs.

I always found technical support to be excellent, but I was always disappointed by Oracle's penchant for advocating the installation of Oracle products in a virtualized environment based on Oracle VM, and in one particular case, support’s unwillingness to assist with a down-production VM that was running on VMware ESXi unless we de-virtualized it so it could be troubleshot on bare metal.

The only product for which I had used a direct competing product was the Oracle Linux operating system. Previously, all of my experience had been on RHEL. The choice to use Oracle Linux was made solely on the basis that the environment already had a large install base of other Oracle products. The transition from RHEL to Oracle Linux wasn’t noteworthy, as it’s almost identical.

The complexity of the initial setup depends on the product. Having plenty of previous experience with RHEL, implementing Oracle Linux was incredibly easy. OCFS2, Grid Infrastructure, and ASM were more complex in varying degrees, with Grid Infrastructure and ASM requiring a massive amount of research to get up and running correctly.

I was able to implement Oracle Linux, OCFS2, Grid Infrastructure and ASM, all with minimal assistance from Oracle customer support or vendor support. The online resources, particularly with how to manage Grid Infrastructure and ASM are more than adequate for a competent Systems Administrator to work through most any issue.

As for implementation advice, I found it beneficial to follow Oracle’s documented recommendations wherever security or other technical aspects are non-prohibitive. That is certainly helpful when opening cases with technical support as technical details are familiar to the support personnel making it easier for them to provide support.

I don't think ROI is as quantifiable as market research groups attempt to make it seem. Each occurrence of unexpected downtime has different variables, such as what section of the user community is impacted, how long the downtime lasts, what level of redundancy is in place to minimize the impact to the business’ productivity, etc.

All of the Oracle products I managed were very reliable, as outages were typically caused by factors beyond its control, such as bad SQL queries or in-house application code written without adequate error checking. The redundancy of the Oracle RAC solution made patching much less intrusive to the business (for RAC rolling patches) and multiple node processing, while certainly beneficial, I did not believe we processed workloads with intense enough database I/O to outshine a stand-alone installation by a huge amount.

As it were, very few of our outages were directly caused by a problem with one of the Oracle products. We implemented Oracle RAC as primarily a redundancy solution. Performance gain, and there certainly was some, came as a welcome additional benefit.

I also do not appreciate Oracle using huge discounts on various software licenses as a method to coerce customers into purchasing Oracle VM, especially when IT management has already committed to the virtual environment being run on VMware ESXi.

VMware is the leader in virtualization technology, and while I completely understand the difficulty of competing in that market, I feel it is detrimental to the Oracle/customer relationship, as we were forced to modify our environment, which resulted in additional downtime, for the sake of troubleshooting something that had previously been operating without issue.

Oracle’s online documentation was very adequate for most troubleshooting, however, I would infer that only after learning the terminology used for the various products. I don’t know if it’s possible to overcome this technically (e.g. better search capability with online documentation), as this is more of an educational issue. I believe it would be beneficial for Oracle, or resellers of Oracle products, to host a conference at a customer’s location after the purchase of more complex products as an introduction to the terminology and operational philosophy (e.g. Grid Infrastructure is more of an operating environment than a piece of installed software) for both infrastructure and application engineers.

The best piece of advice I can give another administrator is to not underestimate the effort required to learn the terminology and philosophy, in addition to all of the technical details. This will make navigating the abundance of Oracle’s online documentation much easier and reduce implementation and troubleshooting times.

Additionally, thoroughly document your specific environment. With the complexity of some of Oracle’s products, you are bound to forget important details at inopportune times and having documentation to refer back to can be invaluable.

We use the solution as a database and operating system. 

The tool's performance is good. 

The product's support is expensive. 

I have been using the solution for two years. 

The tool's stability is good. I would rate the product's stability a ten out of ten. 

The product is scalable. We have 1500 users for the solution. 

The tool's tech support is good. 

The product's setup is easy. The software's setup took six months to complete. We required a team of seven members consisting of developers and engineers to deploy the solution. 

We sought the help of other people to deploy the solution. 

The product's pricing is cheap. The tool's pricing is yearly. 

I would rate the solution a ten out of ten. 

It is an operating system that is used for running some applications.

There were some problems when updating the operating system, which affected the system as a whole.

I would like functioning updates, which make sure that after installing the patches, everything is working as before.

Moreover, there is room for improvement in technical support.

I have been using this solution for a few years. I have been using version 8 of Oracle Linux.

Oracle Linux is a stable product, and I would rate the stability an eight out of ten because sometimes there are issues when installing patches or renewing licenses.

It is a scalable solution. However, the number of users depends on the customer, sometimes several hundred, and sometimes the number of users is less than forty.

The customer service and support team is okay, and it could be more responsive.

I used Solaris. We switched because Solaris is not fully developed as compared to Oracle Linux.

The initial setup is okay. It took around three hours to install and run the operating system.

We installed it in-house.

The customer usually buys the license, and it's a one-time purchase.

I would definitely recommend using the solution.

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We use the solution to manage the databases.

The solution's most valuable feature is its capability to provide a safe and secure environment.

They should make the solution user-friendly. Also, they should add documentation and video lessons to guide us about its new features. We have a team of specialists who can train us on it, but we need help finding enough information.

It is a stable solution.

The solution's technical support team answers all our queries.

The solution's initial setup is complicated.

It is an expensive solution for us. 

It is challenging to work with Oracle Linux, but it is a stable and secure solution. I recommend it to others and rate it as an eight.