Oracle Linux Reviews

The most valuable feature of Oracle Linux is that it's a very stable product. It seems to be based on Red Hat. We waited for a few years before adopting it, but now that we've adopted it, it's been very stable for us. The license and adaptability of it is probably be the biggest selling point for us.

In this day and age, we'd be very cautious in terms of licensing, but with the Oracle Linux it's very clear how you license it, and also it's the flexibility of it. Sometimes we find with the Oracle licensing it's quite vague in some of the products. With this here, it was very, very, clear what we had to pay for it, and what we got, and also what we can get in the future.

Oracle's products are quite expensive. The reason why they're expensive is probably the reason why we purchase them, in terms of the stability, and we know that even though we're paying heavily for the product, we can't afford to be going with other inferior products.

We want to run -- we do run -- a High Availability environment. The documentation in and around Oracle Linux and the hosting of WebLogic on Oracle Linux from a clustering point of view was, at best, average. We had to search for many, many articles and get MyOracle support involved to get to the point where we actually ended up with the High Availability solution that our business needed. Again, when they put these products on the market, their documentation needs to be an awful lot clearer about how you get to the places you want to be.

It's incredibly stable. We've had little to no issues with instability.

Before any major software releases or major changes to our infrastructure, everything is tested to a really, really high level. We would never actually go live with anything without being stable, but it took us longer than it should have to get there.

The reason why we went for Oracle Linux ahead of even Red Hat or, originally HP-UX, was because the product licensing was very, very, clear, whereas it was a little bit vague with the other products. In this day and age, there's very much a focus on cost, keeping the costs down, and spending wisely.

The initial setup was difficult. We wanted High Availability, and it was that part in particular that was giving us severe problems. It uses a repository to holder details between the High Availability instances, and we found that that was quite complicated to set up, and even now it's a little bit buggy.

It would have been difficult. We try to have high availability, and in particular the high availability part of it gave us severe problems. It uses what's known as a repository to hold details between your high availability instances, and we found that they're quite complicated to set up, and even now a little bit buggy.

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.

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.

It is nice that it's ready made for deployment in OVM (Oracle VM for x86) with templates.

But, there's only some/limited vendor support when running on Oracle-branded hardware. There's no other reason I can think of to use Oracle Linux over any other Linux. If it were completely up to me, I'd be running the latest LTS version of Ubuntu Server.

We're able to deploy easily with the read-made templates for OVM.

From a product perspective, there needs to be more rapid upstreaming of security fixes released by Red Hat or Fedora.

Free vendor support? There's not much really. And Oracle Linux is feature-poor compared to other Linux distributions, and they're much slower than Red Hat, CentOS, or Amazon to release security patches and bug fixes

I've used it for five years or longer. I've also worked extensively with Solaris, OEL (5 and 6) and OVM for X86 and OVM for SPARC (LDOMs). I'd still recommend Solaris, but not OEL. I haven't used OEL for 9 months since leaving my previous job. Where I work now we use exclusively Debian Linux 7.x Stable, with a view to migrating our cloud platforms to Debian Jessie Stable.

There were vulnerabilities during deployment due to extended lead-time releasing security fixes (e.g. shellshock).

We have had no issues with the stability.

We have had no issues scaling it for our needs.

The technical support was average, and support for other Oracle products (e.g. Solaris) deteriorated substantially after Oracle bought Sun Microsystems. I do not like Oracle's support model one bit, and I loathe having to use WebMethods, which looks and feels and behaves like something from the 1990's.

If I had to use an RPM-based distribution, I'd rather use CentOS or Amazon Linux.

The initial setup with the ready-made templates was nice.

We performed the deployment with our in-house team only. The only assistance from Oracle has been with Oracle hardware issues in OVM for x86, and installation of Oracle applications on OEL.

I'd only use it if I was forced to use Oracle x86 hardware. I'd opt for something else given the freedom to do so. OEL seems confining, restricted, and primitive.

Just don't do it, unless you're locked in by your vendor, or hardware, or project manager.

The biggest advantages of going with Oracle Linux are that it's very stable and it's an open source solution. Also, because we run a lot of other Oracle products, it's great that we can get support for it as part of our Oracle infrastructure.

It's really improved the reliability of our applications both in terms of the fact that Oracle Linux is so stable and because it works well with our other Oracle products. That's very valuable as we maintain an infrastructure that includes basic, high quality technologies from a one vendor.

It would be nice if they could release newer versions quicker. Sometimes we have to wait a while for some new versions to come out with features that we need. You want to be taking advantage of some newer features as soon as possible in order to function better.

We've had no issues at all deploying it.

I think it's fine, there's no issue there. It's been very, very stable.

We have no issues scaling it for our needs.

We use Red Hat as well. They're pretty comparable. I think they're pretty much the same from what I could tell, the differentiator being, of course, that we also run other Oracle products.

It's implemented just fine. The installer is pretty easy and straightforward. The ease of setting it up was a combination of the product and knowledge on our part.

We did the implementation ourselves.

Study ahead of time so you know what you're working with. It's not difficult, but you should know enough to make it easier on yourself.

Most people see Linux as just Linux. However, in Oracle Database shops, Oracle Linux tends to have a little bit higher level of trust among DBAs as the more reliable solution.

I'm at a big Oracle shop right now, and although we do run Oracle Linux, it's not to the exclusion of another Linux flavor. We're standardized on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server because it tends to be cheaper.

Oracle Linux tends to be a little buggy and sluggish at the virtualization layer. It's been my experience that probably about 85 to 90% of the time certain features are about three-quarters baked. I don't like that.

We've had no issues with deployment really, except for that bugginess and sluggishness at the virtualization layer.

There are those bugs at the virtualization layer, though it's overall generally stable.

I've not had to experience scaling it at that level because I don't do a lot of architecture work. I don't see an issue with scalability, though.

If you've got a problem with Oracle Linux, because it's an Oracle product, you log a ticket. I've never had to log a ticket, but it should be a straightforward process.

Compared with my many, many years of experience in the commercial UNIX world, if we had a problem or didn't know how to fix a particular issue, we called IBM. With SLES, we just referred to the many different resources available.

If they decide they want to have all the tools, if you have to have the support and if the DBA's are calling the shots that, you know, it's a big Oracle shop and they decide they want to have all Oracle Linux and maybe there was a deal cut and maybe they got a better deal from them than they got from Novell who own SLES.

Oracle Linux is very easy to use and very easy to configure for other Oracle products. For example, if you use NoteTaker, it's so easy to just get to the part that's the pre-validated package and very easy to script everything. I can get a new machine in a few minutes. Of course, you don't need a subscription, you can use the public key repository, so it makes the installation even easier. I can run tons of Linux boxes like this for all of our QA, for example. I can just spin a new one and that's very nice.

It needs things like OpenStack and LXC containers, support for Docker and resource manager in Docker. However, this is all in their road map and they have it all covered. Even before I find something lacking, Oracle already knows about it and it will get done.

I've used it since version 4.

We've had no issues with deployment.

It's rock solid. It's completely perfect. It's enterprise-grade Linux, so we've had no issues with instability.

I don't really know about its scalability because we don't use it for large installations. We just usually use many smaller ones so we can run independent tests on them.

It's been so stable that I've never had to contact technical support.

It's very straightforward and simple to set up.

We implemented it ourselves without in-house team.

The stability and security of the product is at the top of its class. These features are really the most valuable for us in our experience with it.

We wanted to move to a Linux operating system for our backend servers, and we used Oracle Linux to successfully do that.

We would like Oracle to add more functionality in terms of the GUI. There are more things we'd like to be able to do straight from the GUI itself.

We used this solution as a prerequisite for deployment of a Keyword driven Automation Framework (Oracle Flow Builder).

There were no issues with the deployment.

The stability was great. We haven't had any issues with instability.

We had no issues scaling it for our needs.

Customer service has been good in our experience.

Technical support has been good in our experience.

The initial setup was complex in a Linux environment compared to setting up on a Windows OS.

We implemented it through our own in-house team.

Since it is open source, you'll have a great ROI.

We had previously tried Red Hat Linux but stuck with Oracle Linux for our installation of other native Oracle products.

My advice would be to follow instructions and have a Linux technician at hand. You could try to install it in a sandbox before using it in a production machine.