Oracle Linux Reviews

We are using Oracle Linux for server systems.

I have been using Oracle Linux for approximately one year.

The stability of Oracle Linux is good.

Oracle Linux is scalable, We have thousands of systems running on it.

We have no plans to increase usage but we are only maintaining what we have.

I would rate the support from Oracle a four out of five.

We have previously used CentOS, which is quite different from Oracle Linux. and Red Hat because we are running Oracle databases.

The initial setup is reasonably straightforward.

We did the implementation of Oracle Linux in-house. We have two people who are supporting this solution.

The price of Oracle Linux is similar to Red Hat. That's the reason why we went, with a combination of CentOS and Red Hat, and then later to all Oracle Linux. We not do not have to maintain two different solutions.

If you choose the support there are additional costs but there are not any other costs.

The price of Oracle Linux overall could be less expensive.

Oracle Linux is very good. Oracle has put a good amount of effort into enhancing it from generic, plain Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Oracle's purposes. The support is good, it is all we asked for.

I rate Oracle Linux a nine out of ten.

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 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.

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 are currently using Oracle ERP, and based on Oracle's recommendation, it is best to use Oracle Linux.

The features that I have found to be the most valuable are the performance, stability, and support that Oracle offers for the solution.

I am not currently able to discuss the products in-depth, as I function at an upper level of management. I will need to consult with my team, who have hands-on experience with the solution. However, one improvement that I would like to see is an upgrade to increase its adaptability with new gadgets such as mobile devices and tablets. The interface should be easy to use. Also, the interface of the tool is a bit old and follows a traditional style.

I have been using Oracle Linux for the past three to four years. Our organization is currently using Oracle Linux Version 7, and we are considering upgrading it to Version 8.

Based on our experience so far, the stability of this solution has been good. I would rate it an eight out of ten for its stability.

In my opinion, this solution is scalable when benchmarked against KVM. While we have only recently implemented this solution, we have not experienced any scalability issues so far. From an ERP point of view, I think maybe ten people are using this solution. From a scalability perspective, I would rate it an eight or nine out of ten.

We receive support from Oracle for both Oracle Linux and Oracle ERP. In terms of technical support, I would rate this solution a six out of ten. The support process is time-consuming as it involves several steps. We first contact them for an issue, then they ask for some other sort of things like logs, after which they provide a patch. Then, we need to take a clone of that and apply the patch. After that, we need to test it out. Then, we again need to take time out for the protection services. We then apply the patch on the protection, take the backups, and do a few other things, which is overall a time-consuming job.

Neutral

We are currently in the process of upgrading to a KVM product. Before this, we were using Oracle OVS and Oracle VM, but we're moving to KVM. According to my team, KVM is a bit challenging to understand, and they need to invest a significant amount of time to properly configure it by reading the documentation. If I were to rate the setup process on a scale of one to ten, I would rate it a five from a KVM point of view, indicating an intermediate level of difficulty. It took my team a few weeks to deploy the solution, as we couldn't devote 100% of our time to the deployment process. However, we can spare some time in a day to carefully configure the solution. Also, our company has a team of three people.

Calculating ROI can be challenging, particularly in our economy, where the dollar rate keeps fluctuating a lot. Many factors that are considered in ROI calculations are tied to the dollar, and our company is not doing good business as well. However, we typically aim for solutions that will be effective for three to five years. From Oracle's point of view, this solution is stable, reliable, and performs well. We also have the local expertise to manage it. Overall, we are achieving a medium level of ROI, and so far, I would say that it is an okay solution.

This solution is very cost-effective, as it is essentially free, with charges only for support purposes. From a cost perspective, I would rate it as very cheap on a scale of one to ten, and I believe that our company can easily afford it. In terms of profitability, I would rate it an eight out of ten. On a scale of one to ten, with one being the most cost-efficient and ten being the most expensive, I would rate this solution a two or three.

Currently, we do not use any of the blaze servers, only independent servers such as rack mount servers and HPE servers. From the software perspective, we use multiple software solutions, including Linux and Microsoft. In terms of hardware, most of our servers are HPE servers, with a few Dell servers also in use. However, we are planning to upgrade our hardware and are considering composite blaze servers, which will help us reduce our energy footprint and improve management. We are evaluating options from both Cisco and HPE Synergy too. Our use of Microsoft technologies is limited, and we currently have a Cisco firewall in place. Our internet is provided by Kaspersky, and most of our software runs on the Linux operating system. As for Linux, we are mainly interested in Oracle Linux. Endpoint is something that is for business use. Overall, I rate this solution a seven out of ten.

I value Oracle's commercial vetting of enterprise-grade Linux. I value the enterprise grade repo which has all the functionalities of what Red Hat offers -- but Red Hat wants to charge a fortune for self-sufficient end users like me who do not require support and who are qualified and capable of supporting themselves. Oracle does not do this and they value that I have an interest in their products and do not charge me an arm and a leg to build my professional knowledge of any of their products. 

This serves to benefit Oracle in that they are growing the knowledge base. Indeed, it is an ever expanding knowledge base, and with a larger knowledge base comes a larger customer base for them. They understand the needs of engineers who want to grow their skillset around Oracle product offerings as they know and understand, that it is people like me, who are down in the trenches of doing the actual work, that Oracle uses as a reference base for making inroads into a solid customer base.

Another thing that I value is that Oracle has a repo pre-installer entry that is explicitly for Oracle Database, and when installing the database on Oracle Linux, I'm able to simply install the 11g or 12c pre-install settings, and this provides the optimal Oracle Linux configuration to run an Oracle Database server. I really love this enhancement from Oracle in their Linux, on behalf of 11g and 12c database servers.

I have a beef with the installer (Anaconda / Kickstart) on occasion, especially between versions. What I find sometimes is that it has bugs and doesn't work. I have to burn up a lot of time in trying to craft workarounds and getting it to work. It doesn't happen all of the time, but the last couple of versions (7.0, 7.1, 7.2) had some nasty issues where the installer would just simply crash and burn. It's fine as long as the buggy version isn't your only version of choice, in which case, you would be up the creek without a paddle. Oracle need to make sure that their bare-metal installers work, as I don't want to have to debug their code for them.

We could, at some point, benefit from an enterprise-grade Linux solution without paying huge support fees to Red Hat. Besides, Oracle would already have a ready-made investment in people like me for getting Oracle Linux into their existing enterprise customer base. Simply by making it painless for people like me to learn how their stuff work as opposed to Microsoft and RedHat. They want to charge a fortune for the 'privilege' to be taught by them. They don't do this because they already know what I am doing and they are not going to force me to cough up thousands of dollars to learn how their stuff works. They have demonstrated that they are quite confident in their OTN users abilities to learn about their products simply by reading what Oracle has documented and what they have shared about their products. They have given us credit that we are all professionals and that we 'should' all know how to read, write and count to 10.

Now what I don't want to hear from Oracle is "oh, that's what we got from the master source tree from Fedora (or whoever they rely on)." So, I don't care if bugs fell in their lap - don't send those bugs out into the field. I really couldn't care less whose fault it is I just want them to fix it! And if they can't fix it, don't upset the customer by sending out software that they know good and well has issues in it and hope that no one notice. I notice and it only serves to upset us. Oracle needs to keep in mind that although I am an OTN user on their network I am also working with one of their largest customers in their customer base. Oracle doesn't need to forget this fact or take it for granted that I don't work for anyone important so, they need to simply handle all of their OTN users as if each one of us works for a very important customer of theirs.

We use the solution for our internet banking product. 

I like the product's stable distribution. The tool offered us very good experience since it was very stable. 

I would want Oracle to explore more of Kubernetes and micro services. 

The solution is stable and it is one of the reasons for us to choose the product. 

The product's setup is okay. My company has an experienced team for the product's deployment. The deployment took two days to complete. 

We did the tool's deployment in-house. 

I would rate the product a nine out of ten. The solution is one of the best Linux OS for servers. 

The tool’s password policies help us to create users and groups. We can also plan on the access that will be given to them. I use it for identity management during the installment and configuration process. We use it to start or stop processes and services. Another use case of the solution is post-opening.

The tool’s user interface needs to improve.

I have been using the solution for around seven to six years.

The tool’s stability depends on the system. The operating system’s stability is good. 

We have around 800 server systems. Our company has about 400 users of Linux. We plan to increase the usage.

The tool’s setup is straightforward. The installation is not complex, we can do it on our own. My team installed the product through the Command Line and GNU. The installation takes around two hours to complete. We completed two sets of operating systems. The tool’s installation depends on the target components. The access management part takes around one week to complete. We have around eight technical staff for the product.

I would rate the solution an eight out of ten.