Oracle Linux Reviews

Healthcare IT.

Stable Oracle deployments.

Easy Oracle integration: Oracle preinstall packages available on YUM.

Kernel updates.

Well, the most valuable features are not the technical features. The most valuable feature is more of a support case feature. They build the operating system, we also run on Oracle hardware, and we run an Oracle database on top of that. The big benefit is having one vendor to go to for your hardware questions, your database questions and the operating system in the middle. So it makes life a lot easier. In general, they know more about it. They are simple cases, because you've got everything from one vendor.

One technical aspect I like is Ksplicing. You can patch Linux without having downtime.

Those two combined with the sophistication from Oracle products on Oracle Linux sums it up. Ksplicing and a certified one-vendor approach is in many cases the biggest benefits.

In general, if they move off from Windows, they will see quite heavy cost-cutting. You've got some heavier costs when you move off from Red Hat and especially if you combine it with the hardware deal where you run it on Oracle hardware. You get the support for the operating system for free; it's quite a major case. That is something you can expect and see a return on investment quite quickly.

In all honesty, there are not that many additional benefits except for the money and the other items I've mentioned, in relation to Red Hat, because the operating systems are quite the same. It is more about the financial and support and Ksplicing; those are the main differentiators. But, in general, we see customers going down in costs when they move off from Red Hat to Oracle Linux.

Regarding areas for improvement, I think they follow the main kernel filler. The only thing from what I can see as an improvement is the level of adoption in the Linux community because I too often see non-Oracle products at first not being released or not being certified as Oracle Linux. You see more adoption in Red Hat even though they are binary-compatible. You often see that those extras are not directly available on the Oracle download repositories, whereas with Red Hat there is a lot available. And Oracle is quite focused on its own product stack. You can get everything running; everything that you can run on Red Hat you can run on Oracle Linux. However, it is not that integrated. It's no big deal, it takes you a couple of extra commands, but they could spin off more adoption by doing that.

In all honesty, I know that their graphical user interface is very basic, but I think 99.9% of people use it on a server version that doesn't have any display connected to it. Therefore, there's no reason for doing that. I don't see that much improvement specifically for Oracle Linux; I have the same stuff as for Linux in general. There's the adoption of specific drivers as such, but nothing specific for Oracle Linux. I think that they are a very good competitor to Red Hat.

We adopted Oracle Linux seven or eight years ago, when we started moving off from Red Hat. In that time frame, you're generally investing knowledge into Oracle Linux. I think it's around seven years or something.

I haven't seen any big stability issues with a couple of customers that are doing Oracle Linux. The only issues we have seen are more generally kernel-related, so Red Hat would have the same issue.

The big benefit is that you have additional stability if you run Oracle products, because you always have the guarantee that if you upgrade anything, Oracle software will continue running. You're not running the risk that you'll break anything, within reason. A bug is always possible, but if you're running an Oracle shop, running Oracle Linux makes absolute sense because it is part of their testing strategy to ensure that the databases work if they bring out stuff.

That is, in general, what I tell my customers: "You're running an Oracle database, use Oracle Linux." There is stuff in there that helps you run your database optimally and those guys always have their own products in mind. If you are an Oracle shop, don't go for Red Hat. You've got the financial part, but also it's from the same vendor. They know the guys from database themselves, and they keep them in mind when they bring out a patch. That makes absolute sense.

With scalability, we have customers that are scaling up their machines, but also scaling up cluster-wise. In general, there is no big issue with scalability. It is really stable; Oracle puts out really stable releases.

I do not engage a lot with Oracle's customer support or technical support. In general, we do the outsourcing part. Our teams engage a lot with Oracle and we step in when things are not going that smoothly. If it is a really big issue and they can't find the root cause or a solution, that's when I step in. It's not that much, but every now and then I need to engage with those guys. Sometimes support is good, sometimes support is bad. I think that's the case with every vendor, but in general they have quite knowledgeable teams. What I see with Oracle is that they are willing to build you a solution if you can tell them what's wrong with something. If you find a bug, you quite quickly know that it's being promoted to the development teams. And you see that ending up in the next version, you see it ending up in patches. That's quite good.

There is not really that much to say about setup and the transition. It was quite a walk in the park for a lot of our engagements where we had a very simple transition, especially for databases. You have to remember everything is binary-compatible, so we just brought the new machines and moved over all the applications and all the databases we were running with Red Hat for those specific customers. We anticipated undergoing quite a heavy transformation, but it turned out that, in general, it was quite a simple transformation.

We still do that today, for new customers that onboard that are running IT professionally and say "We would like to move to a cloud-generated data center". We say, "Okay, you can stick with Red Hat, but for the same money, we can move you off to Oracle Linux and then you actually get a discount."

Because we already have Oracle Linux, we don't charge them for that and it makes our lives easier. Every now and then, you have an off-case where they did some funny stuff, but in general it is a very simple transformation. Nothing scary, nothing complicated over there. Quite easy.

My general feeling would be "Don't worry too much." It is not that complicated. It's a very stable Linux distribution, and especially when you're in doubt, you can always reach out to the guys from Oracle. That is, of course, if you chose to pay for it, but you can try this stuff for free. You can spin it off on a VirtualBox image. Just download stuff, just give it a try and you will see how easy it is. That's my general advice.

If you're an Oracle shop, it should be the first operating system in the Linux sphere to think about. Don't start doing stuff yourself with Red Hat or other distributions.

If you like it, buy the support. It is a stable release and in my honest opinion, I think we will see more and more that Oracle is optimizing their kernels for their software. In that case, it will continue to grow. I think in a couple of years, you will see much more Oracle software-specific stuff within that kernel. For the future, it's a good direction to head into if you're running Oracle shop and also if you're not running on Oracle shop.

What I like about Oracle Linux is that out of the box it's already pre-optimized, pre-configured, has all the right RPMs, has checking packages. It's basically all the stuff I would have to do with a different distribution manually. It probably saves me a couple of hours on each time I do a database install, and that's worth a lot. Plus, the performance is better because it's been highly optimized or tuned. The kernels been optimized. The memory management specifically is better, so it makes for a very stable platform.

Performance and stability. I can get maximum performance with the least amount of effort, and stability-wise, I never have a crash. I've yet to have one.

One of them is because I'm lazy, and most people wouldn't admit that, but when you go from version 6 to version 7 of Linux, a lot of commands changed, and even some file locations have changed. I wish they would keep the compatibility mode, or the stupid mode for me for a couple of years. I hate to learn new commands right away, but it is what it is.

Just keeping up, keeping the pace with the Red Hat main distributions, so if Red Hat's on 7.3, I'd like to see Enterprise Linux on 7.3, at the same time. On one occasion, I think they actually beat Red Hat. I think they came out with their point release first. That's what I would kind of like, is for them to stay very aggressive on that, because kernel modifications typically end up being performance. They have taken the best of Solaris and put it into it. They keep adding tools that are necessary for doing performance optimization and monitoring. It's very mature.

What's really nice about the stability is that even when you have situations that might cause issues with other OSs, other variants of Linux, Oracle Enterprise Linux seems to do a better job of catching and handling those exceptions. An example would be, maybe I'm doing a wrap-cluster or I'm using ASM, automatic storage management, there are some cases where those products can cause an error that might cause a different distribution of Linux to maybe hang or lock or get confused. With Enterprise Linux it seems to be a non-issue. It's very stable.

I love the scalability. Because of the fact that it's already optimized for performance, I can scale it to whatever maximum numbers I need very easily. The only time I have to make any adjustments is if I'm doing RAC, real application clusters, I may want to tune a little bit differently based on the number of nodes, but it's very minimal.

Oracle technical support is like most companies with technical support. It's either great or horrible. It sort of depends on the phone call. Generally speaking, it's great. A lot of times though, if you're in a mission critical situation, you need to get them to escalate you to level two so that you can get beyond the first level and typically you can get an answer quicker. I would say the most interesting interaction I had with them was, one time I was patching an Exadata machine and I did a step wrong because I didn't read all the directions. Did an incorrect step. Ruined my Exadata box. Made sure that they got me to second level support, and then it took us about eight hours working together but we got it recovered. Very few vendors would have spent eight hours, midnight to eight AM, just on a phone call.

I was an early adopter of Linux, long before companies saw the light, and before it went mainstream. I would say I got into the early adopter, sort of experimental stage, so that I would be prepared when my companies were positioned to take advantage of it, I would already be an expert.

I actually started using Linux, probably about the time that Red Hat was Red Hat version 3, so more than a decade ago, probably closer to 15 years, and part of that was because I could see that the commoditization of hardware was going to mean that server rooms were going to be predominantly Intel, and they were going to predominantly be Windows and Linux, and you'd better know both of them. With Linux being a much lower cost OS, and also hosting databases like Oracle really well, you just knew it was going to end up in the Enterprise environment, and it just made sense to work with Enterprise Linux. Now I worked originally with Red Hat and CentOS, but it very clearly became evident to me that Oracle Enterprise Linux, starting at version 5.8, was just as good, just as stable, offered more with very few differences in the learning curve.

Oracle does have a few additional tools that are not on the standard distribution, but they actually make your job a lot of easier, like for example, one of them is an RPM check. It just checks to make sure we have all of the pre-loaded or the pre-required RPMs loaded, and there's nothing to do other than to activate it, and it just gives you a message. It's not very hard to learn these additional features.

Honestly, if you've done any Linux installation of any distribution, and specifically if you've done CentOS or Red Hat, all that really changes are some of the images and backgrounds and colors and labels, but other than that, it's probably 98% identical, but Oracle does have some optimizations and some additional RPMs already installed. It's a very small difference, but if you know Linux, and even if you're with a different variant, say like a Ubuntu, you'll still be okay. You won't be a fish out of water.

I think that the licensing model is fair. It's reasonable. What's nice is that if you have the database tech support or maintenance, and you have the Linux support or maintenance, for them it's one phone call. Now you may switch a person on the phone, but you're not having to call and get back in the queue again, so it's nice to deal with one company, especially for a critical asset like a database.

The marriage with the database, to me is the most critical or most important item. Now I know that sounds like I may be pandering to Oracle, since they make the database and they make the OS, but it's just a natural. The same as with Microsoft SQL Server. Why do you run it on Windows? Now, I know it's coming on Linux, but where will it probably run best for a long time? Probably on Windows.

Having that marriage between the OS and the database is critical, and Oracle really understands their database, better than anybody else, and they seem to understand Linux as well as anybody else, and they were an early contributor, so it's just a natural progression to put the database on their Linux.

Rating: It’s a 10, because even though there are free alternatives, I mean totally free alternatives, like CentOS, I've quit using them. For me to quit using something that's totally free, with no even maintenance charges, must mean that what I've chosen is worth every penny of whatever costs there are. Oracle Linux is clearly there.

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. 

Oracle Enterprise Linux offers a cost effective solution, especially for customers who are currently supported on Red Hat. They find it extremely comfortable moving over to OEL, Oracle Enterprise Linux. It not only it cuts down the cost, but there is no code change, there is no technology challenge that they have to undergo. I find it extremely comfortable talking to clients and asking them to move over from Red Hat to Linux.

It's comfortable, kernel calls are very important. Lines, application codes, it's a lift and shift kind of a platform. The customers that I'm getting on there, they are very comfortable moving over to Linux. It not only ensures performance, it ensures cost effective solutions.

We are still naive, I would say. We need to see as we go there.

We have just transitioned about four customers as of now. We haven't faced any such challenges as of now.

That is what we are trying to do now. We have selected three or four as a pilot. Now we are trying to launch it on a big scale.

Support has been excellent. Support has been really excellent and for every account they work closely with us; right from getting the PO to closing the order, so extremely convenient.

I'm getting excellent support from Oracle as of now, the team dynamics are very good, my team finds it extremely comfortable working with the OEL team. We may have a lot more accounts in the next financial year.

We use this solution as an operating system to run Oracle databases through.

We have found that this solution significantly improves our ability to run test scenarios, and parallel queries, across massive databases.

We find the consolidated support for this solution and other same vendor systems to be an extremely valuable feature.  This allows for faster resolution of issues and consistency of support personnel.

We would like to see the cloud setup to be evolved, to allow for setting up of clusters of the operating system for this solution. 

We have been working with this solution for the last year and a half.

We have rarely encountered any issues with the stability of this solution, and when they do occur they are generally issues with storage and not the operating system.

We have found this to be an easily scalable solution.

The technical support for this solution is good, and they are usually able to resolve any issues we escalate to them.  However, it takes time for the engineers to contact us, and can take up to three days for an issue to be resolved completely.

As we only escalate high priority issues to them, that we cannot deal with in-house, the time delay can be a problem.

Neutral

We switched to this solution for the portability of operating system that it offered us.

The initial setup for this solution is fairly easy, and has the advantage of all the prerequisites being installed due to the operating system being in place. 

The total deployment took less than five hours to complete, and the majority of this time was taken up with restoring the data from one of our UAT environments.

The implementation, and deployment, of this solution was carried out in-house.

We have found the ROI for this solution to be from the consolidated support, and the time this saves.

The licensing for this solution is based on the number of calls running Oracle databases, and are purchased either annually, or every three years.

We would recommend this solution for new Oracle database deployment, particularly if the staff working with the solution are not very experienced or highly technical.

We would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

• Performance – Running on an operating system that is optimized for Oracle software provides significant performance gains.
• Stability – Oracle Linux provides a far more stable platform than Microsoft Windows.
• Supportability – Oracle releases security fixes and bug fixes first on Oracle Linux. Environments are more secure and easier to support.
• Cost – Oracle Linux is roughly half the cost when compared to other comparable Linux distributions.

When designing a new Oracle database platform, Oracle Linux provides built-in benefits for database customers that are not available on any other platform. This has improved the performance, availability, scalability, and security of our architecture.

While the Oracle Linux software is perfectly suited for our needs, the related support processes within Oracle can often be challenging. Having your ticket routed to a capable support engineer can involve several escalations, and there is then a risk that the ticket is transferred to another engineer when the original person’s shift ends, often resulting in a frustrating process of answering many of the same questions again.

Similarly, the time to receive a bug fix can often be longer than in open-source equivalents. Therefore, we always recommend that Oracle Linux implementations are handled with an experienced Oracle Partner, specialized in Linux, who can supplement Oracle’s own support structures with a deeper level of expertise and faster response.

We have used this solution for seven years.

We hit a couple of bugs in the early days of Oracle Linux 5 but in the last few years, the platform has been extremely stable.

The platform is extremely scalable, either in a virtualized fashion or by using the available clustering technology.

I would rate the support provided as a 6 our of 10, due to some slow responses and some delays on getting senior, experienced technical support personnel engaged.

In the past, we had primarily used either Oracle Solaris or Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a standard. Oracle Linux provided a more-agile, easy-to-deploy platform than Solaris, at a lower cost than Red Hat, and including optimizations not available in either of the previous platforms.

The initial setup is very straightforward for a basic server. However, there are complex configurations that can (and should) be added in for enterprise-level environments to provide better performance, stability, and redundancy.

Oracle Linux is roughly half the cost in terms of licensing and support when compared to other comparable Linux distributors.

We had primarily been using Red Hat Linux in the past. We also evaluated SUSE Linux and CentOS.

While it is very straightforward to set up an Oracle Linux server, seek advice from experienced Oracle Partners to ensure that your new servers are customized and optimized to provide the performance, availability, and redundancy you need.

Native support with Oracle database and these features:

• OCFS2 (Clustered File System): Open-source alternative to proprietary cluster file systems.
• Ksplice: Apply patches to the kernel without rebooting the system; zero downtime for critical security updates.
• Dtrace: Excellent diagnostic tool for analysis and troubleshooting ported from Sun Solaris.
• Docker containers: Full support, framework optimized and integrated with WebLogic Server Docker containers.
• Btrfs: Detects file system corruption and fixes it; improves backup operations and improves file system and storage capacity by reducing disk seeks and disk I/O operations.

Each month, my team makes a full update of the environment, including: Windows system, databases, Linux system and network systems. We reduced the downtime considerably on our Oracle databases by using Ksplice on our Linux systems.

Hardware vendors certified by Oracle for installing Oracle Linux are: Dell, HPE and Oracle. The product needs to be certified by more vendors to gain more clients and increase the size of market share.

I started using this solution four years ago.

I have not had any stability issues. My databases servers have been up since the last maintenance and there have been no issues during the business day.

I own a RAC cluster with two nodes. It is a medium-size environment supported by Oracle Linux. Scalability never was a problem in my scenario.

Technical support is technically good, but the response time is high. It can take up to weeks to actually solve the problem.

We used Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but licensing costs with Oracle VM decreased significantly, which motivated the change.

Setup was very complex, using cluster resources and fine tuning at the OS level to improve performance.

If possible, use Oracle VM; prices decrease absurdly!

I didn’t evaluate any other options, because we use Oracle Linux only for Oracle databases. And the Oracle database was in Red Hat and was supported only for two OSs available for my employer: Red Hat and Oracle Linux.

Study and learn about the Red Hat kernel and follow the news releases on the manufacturer site. Read the rich manual that Oracle offers.