Oracle Linux Reviews

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.

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.

It's stable, you have flexibility and dynamics, and it's easy to work with.

Linux is very stable.

Scales well as well.

It works quite well, if there's a problem you can open a ticket and the support works quite well.

It depends on the complexity of the environment, but you can download images and there are all kinds of tools nowadays, so it's quite easy.

I always liked Linux and Unix and Nix operating systems, so I always favor them before anything else. Always recommend them.

My company is based out of Virginia. I do a lot of work with the federal government.

I absolutely love how I can go out, get Oracle Linux, develop something with the Identity and Access Management, and be able to deploy, it and test it, and work on it very, very quickly. That's absolutely what I love, how portable it is and how much it relates. 

If the enterprise I work for has licenses for Red Hat, I don't have to go get a license from Red Hat to start working on my Oracle product. But, once it's developed in Oracle Linux, I can easily take it, and adapt it, and move it onto Red Hat, and it works seamlessly. 

Benefits: If you start with Oracle Linux, you can adapt to any of the Oracle products a little bit easier than any other OS. 

The kernel could be expanded, a little bit more maximized to work with Kubernetes and the like. That's probably where they are going to go, a little bit more orchestration, system maintenance management.

The ability to do self-diagnostics. Run one command and it runs top head memory, tell me what's going on. The ability for the OS to regulate itself, to do self-diagnostics, so you could take out the UNIX admins and the UNIX supports. Tell me what's really wrong, right now in the OS, what does it look like right now?

Stability, scalability, like I said, it compares directly with Red Hat. In some things, the packages, the ability to reach out to the Oracle yum packages, and do automatic updates, it gives you the ability to scale. 

Patching, there's quarterly patches. I actually think they may even do bi-weekly patches now for Oracle Linux. 

The scalability, as long as you have someone to manage it, you're good to go and it's right up there in reliability with the Red Hat stuff.

I can't tell you any experience about the Oracle Linux. But Oracle Support in general, I have to put in tickets for Identity Management all the time. They usually come back, depending on the severity of the problem, within a reasonable amount of time, and I always get what I need. 

At an organizational level, I would love to see them going more Oracle Linux, actually adapting that, getting rid of a little bit of the Red Hat, the notion that Red Hat is the best. I want to see Oracle Linux, it's expanding. 

I think all the stuff that they are doing with analytics and all this work with the autonomous database, it's only going to get to the point where you're going to have autonomous OS's and Linux is going to be autonomous. Why not move to Oracle Linux now? It'll be easier than to move off in the future.

If you don't know Linux, then go learn some Linux. But relatively, if you want to set up a virtual box, set up the Oracle Linux stuff, it's pretty much drag, drop, click, click, click.

I wish my enterprise would adapt it, so I give it a 10 out of 10 in my book. But I guess we'll have to give it a seven and eight out of 10 from an enterprise level, just because they haven't bought in yet.

If you're going to go into the Oracle industry, learn Oracle Linux, learn the ins and outs, and it'll help you out. Like I said, with the whole cloud infrastructure, the whole cloud architecture, I think Oracle Linux is the way to go.

It's a solution that enables us to deploy a valid distribution of Linux. Regarding looking around for a valid patch, and support, so we can sleep well at night with this release.

The idea is to have something that is coming directly from the vendor, instead of having trouble looking around for solutions. We are supported directly from Oracle and this means we can achieve better stuff.

What is missing on this operating system, but it's missing on any Linux flavor, are the clustering capabilities of Solaris. The best clustering solution is on Solaris. Having this kind of feature also on the Linux side would be a good idea. 

No, problems. A year’s running without problems.

At the moment, for us, this is not important for us because we designed the solution in a proper way. Today I'm not facing this kind of problem.

For sure, choosing a vendor that has been around a long time is important for us. The relationship with the vendor is important, because if you have to run a business on top of this operating system, you need to be sure; you don't want to have nightmares, because production is first of all. Then, all the other stuff.

I would say it is more in the "soft" part. Lots of people love Oracle Linux and it gives a lot of stability to our platforms.

It's the skill, I can leverage the skill because it's known by the majority of the people in my organization. It's not a constraint, the fact that I need resources. And it's the stability and the tuning of the system.

I would say better logging of the bugs. Recently we had an issue and it was extremely painful to find out what the issue was on our platform. Only after three weeks of deep analysis did we find out it was a bug in the kernel of Linux. Maybe something that can help to provide better information on the issue itself.

The stability I found is extremely good.

We are pretty good in planning, no issues. Every now and then we face some problem but given the fact that we have really qualified and skilled people we can solve it pretty fast, and the support is good.

It's good when you reach the people, the people with the skill that can support you. Sometimes it's difficult to find the right people and get the right attention. When you have the right people and the right attention, things go smoothly.

I would say straightforward with a little bit of complication. Complication depending, possibly, on the hardware or other stuff related to the platform where it’s running. But overall, straightforward. 

I would suggest start to get some knowledge on your own, know what it is about. Then, when you approach the expert, you know what to ask. Make a dichotomic approach, the right questions.

Basic training is always recommended. I would not go too deep in unnecessary training; do basic training and then start working on it.

I think the most valuable feature for me, as a database professional, is an operating system that has been modified to have more stability in terms of drivers, in terms of the kernel. We have found a lot of problems using other equivalent systems when upgrading the kernel. Using the unbreakable kernel, we have been able to stabilize many systems.

As an organization I would say that having the same company that provides support for Linux, for the operating system, and also the software on top of it -  in my case it's Oracle database - I think that it's closer to having better support, a faster response from support and, of course, better solutions.

I think that the only improvement is staying up with the pace of the technology evolution. As long as Oracle Linux supports all the recent technologies, there are really no more innovations it will need. If the technology itself evolves, as long as Oracle Linux supports it, it's the perfect product.

You start it and you shut it down only when you need to, really, but it never crashes. I have not experienced the crash of Oracle Linux recently.

Well, depending on what you mean by "scaling," in vertical scaling we have systems at my customers that go up to 700 gigabytes. I don't know if it's the most scaling, but definitely it's more than enough to have good database consolidation on the server.

I think it's good. It's not really necessary, too often, to need support for Oracle Linux. Sometimes it depends on hardware drivers, if there is the necessity to have something special. But in general, my impression is that it's stable and we don't need much support.

Again, I have to mention that I am an Oracle database professional, so I'm really focused on this technology. Of course, other operating systems often have many more problems in configuration, in stability, they need much more fine tuning. I don't want to mention them but I will say that many customers are trying to switch from, for example, legacy Unix systems to Linux.

We use, of course, a configuration management tool like Chef Puppet nowadays, or Ansible, so it's really easy to maintain the system. But, even installing for just one server, by hand, now is straightforward. It's not a whole day of installing Linux, that's not the case any more.

We use Oracle Linux with multiple clients for multiple applications.

Over a period of time, feature-wise, functionality wise, the reliability is important for us. 

First of all it is a zero-dollar value, it is free. We only have to pay for support. So it brings down the overall cost. And it is providing the same functionality as any other Linux system that is out there in the market.

Some customers feel about Oracle licensing, while it is free, they are not able to understand the support model for it. They feel the price is high for support. 

I have seen running production systems on it, there is no issue at all, because of the operating system.

I have no experience with scaling, but I believe scalability is as part of it as any other Unix based operating system that is out there in the market.

It is world-class.

It is straightforward and well documented. If people have basic Unix knowledge, they can jump on it. But I would definitely recommend going through the documentation before implementing any operating system in an enterprise environment.

Regarding criteria when selecting a vendor, if I am working in an Oracle world, I would what's important is being "family." If you are using Oracle as a database, using Oracle Linux is a good choice, because you are in the same family. Support is coming from the same vendor. The chances of vendor conflict - for example, being able to pull in people from different vendors; if I'm using Red Hat Linux I would be pulling people from Red Hat Linux, I would be pulling people from Oracle databases - that kind of scenario would not be there. Support would be seamless.

In terms of advice I would say, know your needs first, and if you know your needs, compare Oracle Linux with other operating systems. If you are running Oracle systems, Oracle databases, Oracle Linux is certified by Oracle. I believe all of Oracle is using it internally when building the system. For example, when they're developing Oracle databases or when they're developing Oracle EBS, they're running it on Oracle Linux.

Go for it. Evaluate it, know your needs first, and then see what solution is addressing your need.