Oracle Linux Reviews

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. 

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.

We use this solution to create some scripts, and push, start, and stop our product.

It is a good solution, and the performance is good.

It has a very good operating system, and if anyone wants a secure one, Oracle Linux is a good choice.

Features related to use, feel, and user experience could be improved. It could also have a more user-friendly interface.

We have been using this solution for the past 15 years and are using the latest version.

The stability is very good.

It is a scalable solution.

The technical support is good, and we use the support sometimes. I rate the technical support an eight out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup was straightforward. We did not need an integrator for deployment and completed it ourselves. I rate the setup an eight out of ten.

I rate this solution a nine out of ten, and I would recommend this solution to others.

Fujitsu's Oracle/Intel platform has been specifically designed with Oracle in mind using Oracle VM, Oracle Linux, for our customers wanting to use Oracle product, applications, databases. We've designed it in a way that we get the best possible performance from the applications and databases on our engineered system.

What it's allowed us to do, initially, it allowed us to develop an Intel platform specifically for Oracle. What's most important for us, where it comes across is the licensing. It's very difficult - sometimes you can build a platform that is optimal, but when you apply Oracle licenses across that platform, it isn't the most economical. All of our Intel platform for this has been optimized towards which Oracle solutions are going to be running on it, to get both the best performance but also that will be economical for our customers.

Because it's specifically built for Oracle, with Oracle applications and solutions in mind, we have standard pricing, a standard way of working, a standard cost for each organization. That allows us to save time, on both bid and, once new requirements come along for each organization, we know exactly what it takes to add to that solution, to add to that platform. The saving for us is, we can feed back quickly to grow, respond to new requirements.

With Oracle Linux Ksplice specifically, we have organizations looking for minimum downtime. We're able to apply hot-patching at any time; once we've proven they're tested, ready to go, we don't need to take downtime to apply them.

We have a shared services platform with multiple organizations set on it. So planning downtime across all those organizations becomes more and more difficult. The more organizations we get onto the platform, the less "white space" is available. Ksplice allows us to do hot-patching without the downtime. That, for us, is quite key.

Also, the virtualization, Oracle VM, allows us to get the best performance for our Oracle applications and database solutions. We know it's proven to be more performant with Oracle applications, so we get the best performance out of it on our platform.

What we found in moving from Oracle Linux 6 to Oracle Linux 7 was the whole interfacing with the application and the fact that operating had all changed, all the commands had changed. You need to be aware that there is some kind of training, some kind of handover required for your technical guys, understanding different ways of interacting with it. Bear that in mind.

What we experienced is, the stability is key. What we can't take into account with customers is how they're going to want to use the platform, once we've installed it, once we've got different solutions running on that platform.

We have a use case of a shared platform where we have one large organization set on our Intel platform. The virtualization then allows us to grow out for when we get more and more organizations on.

We've just added another huge organization, DHL, they are now set on that shared platform along with another organization. That hasn't impacted it in the least. We are able to scale out and scale with that organization. That organization itself, that specific program, could grow and grow. So it allows us that flexibility to grow that whichever way. If that organization's business case grows and becomes bigger and bigger, the platform can scale out to that.

It also allows us to add in more organizations on the same platform with one overview of managing. For us, as an organization we can manage it from a single point with multiple organizations using it, with no impact on each other.

We don't have any problems with Oracle technical support. Our guys can normally resolve most of the issues themselves, but where we do require further help, we have direct contact with Oracle, and the turnaround is what we'd expect.

There is a gap for the type of Intel platform we're now providing, from an Oracle perspective. For a lot of the platforms we have our own cloud at Fujitsu, our K5, which is not geared towards Oracle specifically, because of the licensing implications. So we knew there was a requirement for a quick, economical, engineered system, so that the customers can either sit in their own datacenters or we'll place it in our datacenters and manage the service that way.

With Oracle VM and Oracle Linux, it then allows us to scale up, scale out as and when the customers want, their requirements grow, their enterprises grow. Or the requirements change over time; it could be an easy path for them to move from on-premise to cloud, or they may want to bring the cloud, themselves, on-premise.

It's the perfect step for them, if they're not quite ready to move to the cloud - they might never want to go to the cloud, but they want to control security, data, data integrity. All the features they're after as an organization - they may want to go one way, they may not want to go the other way. This fits that platform at that point.

For us to work with any vendor, it's the support and ongoing roadmap with that vendor. We need to understand where it's going, where it's going to end up in the next one to two years, as well as then three to four years. We also need to be able to work closely with them to almost guide that roadmap from our experience, and be able to have input into it as well. That is key with any partner and vendor.

The key for us with our engineered systems is specifically how quick and easy it is to "plug in and play," with a solution. We got the platform in place within a couple of weeks and then another week or so to get everything up and running with the virtualizations, and then the Oracle Linux with all the solutions and applications on top of that.

End-to-end it will take us three to five weeks, depending on the install.

We use our in house expertise at Fujitsu.

As per above, pay attention to how Oracle license their products and make sure you are clear as to the implications of choosing products which can have a significant impact on license cost and supportability. 

We were driven to some part by how the cost of licensing of Oracle databases and needed to ensure the most cost effective way to do this, so really OVM was the only option for us .

I am the Oracle practice CTO. I work for Fujitsu. We cover all the aspects of IT, for enterprise, for infrastructure, through to applications and managed services. I work for the Business Applications Services, we cover anything around enterprise solutions, enterprise architecture, anything that will aid them in their business process. In my role at Fujitsu I oversee all of the Oracle architects, so any solution owners from infrastructure to applications, and all the bits in between. All architects and solution owners report to me.

In the context of, if you're wanting to use the Oracle workloads, absolutely, this is the way you need to go. For non-Oracle workloads, again, no problems with that at all. From Fujitsu's point of view, and where it sits on our Intel platform, this is a no-brainer. We specifically built it with Oracle in mind. Therefore, using Oracle VM and Oracle Linux was the way forward.

If that's the way you're going, if you're looking to use Oracle applications, Oracle Databases, I would definitely recommend using the OVM and Oracle Linux.

It performs perfectly for what we require it to do. There are, obviously, certain issues that have been highlighted in the next version. That's not the product itself, that's just the usability of it. We would rate the Oracle OVM, the Oracle Linux, eight to nine out of 10.

It's very easy to use. We have admins who have been able to administer this product. It is user-friendly. On top of that, we don't have any major issues with this product. The main issue we have with other, similar products that we use is performance. This product does not have any performance issues.

We are using it on a normal scale, but we are using a competitor application on a large scale. The application and the OS that we are using on a large scale has some performance issues. If we are talking about this application for this product, we are satisfied with the performance; we are satisfied with the output and throughput; and we have satisfied customers.

On top of that, this application does not break as compared to other applications.

I would like to see portability to other hardware, such as Dell and Intel platforms, instead of just putting a blinder on only Oracle products or Oracle hardware. The portability is the main challenge, I think. We should be able to port this application to other hardware and other vendors.

This product is more stable as compared to the competitor product that we have. It is more reliable. It doesn't break quite as often. It's user-friendly.

I don't think that it's that scalable, because you have to install Oracle Linux on an Oracle proprietary product. It is not that scalable; meaning, if you want to install this product on Dell or any other platform, you cannot do that. You have to buy an Oracle product in order to use this operating system.

Oracle technical support is quite good. We always have a few issues in this environment. They're user friendly; they’re cooperative with the customer. Their customer app is also excellent, and they provide excellent support.

Actually, my team was involved in supporting this product after it's built. We are in IT operations, so all the support after the handover was done through my team.

About 10 years ago, we were using this product a lot. Over the years, when we saw that it was not that scalable, we looked around for different solutions. We moved new applications onto the new product’s environment. This one we left as-is, so right now, it is in containment; meaning, any new product or any new applications are not porting into this application.

The number one criteria when choosing a vendor such as Oracle is reliability. Number two is cost. Number three is efficacy.

We chose this solution because it doesn’t break down. It provides good performance. It's reliable. Reliability was one of the factors in the decision to choose this.

If you are looking for a reliable product, this is the product. If you're looking for anything which can be scalable, you might need to look something else.

Based on performance, I would rate it higher. Based on scalability, I would rate it lower.

We use the solution on our server and premises.

Pricing could be improved.

I have been using Oracle Linux for a few years.

The product is 99.99% stable.

The solution is very scalable. Sixty-five users are using it.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

It comes with an annual subscription.

If you were to buy Oracle Data Vault or something similar, it includes a firewall. Securing the DPU with Oracle Data Vault is great, but it costs a fortune.

In data center operations, we use distributors. As far as I know, it's distributed across sixteen sites. Besides Oracle Linux, we have other solutions such as Oracle Forms, Reports, and EDS.

I would advise knowing the number of calls and CPUs required for each application and their allocation.

Overall, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.