I primarily use the solution as an operating system, an OS. It's mainly used for hosting some products.
DevOps and Automation Lead | Technical Expert at a comms service provider with 5,001-10,000 employees
A good, stable OS but lacks documentation
Pros and Cons
- "It's mostly reliable."
- "The deployment is a bit complex."
What is our primary use case?
What is most valuable?
It's a decent OS.
It is a stable solution. It's mostly reliable.
What needs improvement?
I did not really enjoy working with the solution.
The deployment is a bit complex.
The community and the documentation were not great. I did not like the end-user experience and decided to move towards an open-source Linux.
For how long have I used the solution?
I haven't used the solution for a very long time.
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What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The solution was stable. It was reliable. There were no bugs or glitches. I'd rate the stability seven out of ten in terms of reliability.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I've never tried to scale the solution. I just used it myself for my personal needs.
How are customer service and support?
While I have never used technical support, the company might have. I'm not sure how useful they were in terms of assistance.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I've also worked with Ubuntu Linux. I've also used Red Hat and CentOS among other solutions. I find other solutions easier to use as opposed to Oracle Linux.
How was the initial setup?
I have found the solution to be a bit complex in terms of the original setup.
I wasn't directly involved in the setup and therefore do not know much about the deployment process. I'm not sure how long it took to deploy.
What about the implementation team?
I didn't deploy the solution on my own. We had a team that managed the deployment.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
While my understanding is that a license is involved, I don't have any details about terms or cost.
What other advice do I have?
I work with the latest version of the solution.
I wouldn't recommend the solution to others. I had an easier time with other operating systems.
I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

Sr. Manager - Tech Ops at a media company with 10,001+ employees
Supports many systems, great support, and reliable
Pros and Cons
- "The stability of Oracle Linux is good."
What is our primary use case?
We are using Oracle Linux for server systems.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Oracle Linux for approximately one year.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The stability of Oracle Linux is good.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
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.
How are customer service and support?
I would rate the support from Oracle a four out of five.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We have previously used CentOS, which is quite different from Oracle Linux. and Red Hat because we are running Oracle databases.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup is reasonably straightforward.
What about the implementation team?
We did the implementation of Oracle Linux in-house. We have two people who are supporting this solution.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
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.
What other advice do I have?
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.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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March 2025

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I was 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.
What is most valuable?
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.
How has it helped my organization?
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.
What needs improvement?
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:
- 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.
- 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.
For how long have I used the solution?
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.
What was my experience with deployment of the solution?
We had no issues with the deployment.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
We have had no issues with the stability.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We have had no issues scaling it for our needs.
How are customer service and technical support?
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.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
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.
How was the initial setup?
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.
What about the implementation team?
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.
What was our ROI?
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.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
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.
What other advice do I have?
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.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Senior Production Support Engineer at a tech consulting company with 10,001+ employees
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.
Valuable Features:
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.
Room for Improvement:
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.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Développeur applications at Trust Merchant Bank
A stable product that offers good experience
Pros and Cons
- "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."
What is our primary use case?
We use the solution for our internet banking product.
What is most valuable?
I like the product's stable distribution. The tool offered us very good experience since it was very stable.
What needs improvement?
I would want Oracle to explore more of Kubernetes and micro services.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The solution is stable and it is one of the reasons for us to choose the product.
How was the initial setup?
The product's setup is okay. My company has an experienced team for the product's deployment. The deployment took two days to complete.
What about the implementation team?
We did the tool's deployment in-house.
What other advice do I have?
I would rate the product a nine out of ten. The solution is one of the best Linux OS for servers.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Sr. Systems Analyst at a maritime company with 10,001+ employees
Requires very little resources, has good technical support, and is stable
Pros and Cons
- "I like that it's very stable and lightweight and that it requires very little resources."
- "Performance can always be improved."
What is most valuable?
I like that it's very stable and lightweight and that it requires very little resources.
What needs improvement?
Performance can always be improved.
For how long have I used the solution?
We have been using this solution for about ten years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It's highly stable.
How are customer service and support?
The technical support is good, and I would rate it at eight on a scale from one to ten.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We were using HP-UX previously, but HP-UX had problems with Oracle. The licensing costs skyrocketed. Also, Oracle stopped supporting databases on Unix. Unix as an operating system seems to have died out; nobody uses it now.
How was the initial setup?
Implementation takes time, but once you have done it, you can forget about it. It's highly stable.
What about the implementation team?
We implemented it ourselves.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
We have a yearly license, and I think Oracle charges too much.
What other advice do I have?
I would recommend any Linux product. However, I would prefer Ubuntu Linux because Oracle costs too much.
I would rate Oracle Linux at eight on a scale from one to ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Senior Oracle DBA at a comms service provider with 501-1,000 employees
The first most valuable feature of Oracle Linux is its kernel design to meet business needs, especially on other Oracle products like Engineered Systems and Cloud Services.
What is most valuable?
The first most valuable feature of Oracle Linux is its kernel design to meet business needs, especially on other Oracle products like Engineered Systems and Cloud Services. It supports demanding workloads such as those on Oracle Database; has features such as Btrfs, Dtrace, OCFS2, Smart Flash Cache, InfiniBand, OpenStack, Linux Container and Docker; and supports data integrity by providing hardware fault management.
Secondly, the Ksplice feature enables zero-downtime kernel updates for bugs and critical security updates. It also minimizes security risks by keeping the system up to date without downtime. It will provide critical kernel patches for both kernel and user space without needing to reboot.
Third, it supports the automatic storage management library for Oracle Database and Oracle Clusterware for Linux.
Lastly, with Spacewalk, you can manage and monitor systems in different locations.
How has it helped my organization?
The Oracle Linux OS plays a significant role in my organization. We've moved most of our systems and applications that were running on Windows, Solaris 10, and Red Hat and consolidated them on our database machine with Exadata, Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c, Oracle Secure Backup/NetBackup, Domain, NTP, and Oracle VM Manager. We've also deployed many of our business applications using Oracle Linus and the Oracle VM hypervisor.
What needs improvement?
I think there's a lot of room for improvement. As our business shifts to virtualization and the cloud, the Oracle Linux infrastructure has seen a lot of changes. And even as virtualization consolidates servers and hypervisors have matured and assumed a strategic position within our datacenter, many applications still don't run on hypervisors. Instead, they run on OS's that run on top of hypervisors. This means that in order for there to be a larger impact, there are some improvements that could be made, such as:
- Optimization of Linux for the virtual environment.
- Containers. We think that the Linux OS will be a great candidate to host container-packaged application workloads. It's still early in the development process, but we expect Oracle to significantly adopt this technology. Oracle has already started deploying some images using Docker with WebLogic and Storage Cloud.
- New deployment models. With virtualization, there are now new ways to deploy software, such as with software appliances and the integrated stack of OS and application software. Oracle Linux should be tailored and optimized to run a single application and managed as a single entity.
- Cloud adoption. With the shift towards cloud application deployments, changes in architecture and delivery model are necessary, which will impact other areas of the datacenter ecosystem.
I'd also like to see Oracle Linux for SPARC. Oracle announced last year the SuperCluster M7, SPARC T7, and SPARC M7 servers, all based on the 32-core, 256-thread M7 microprocessor. If this is supported on Oracle Linux, it will be the first end-to-end implementation of data security in hardware for the Linux foundation. Oracle currently doesn't offer support for Linux for SPARC.
For how long have I used the solution?
We started using Oracle Linux kernel at our data center in 2014. It was deployed on Oracle Exadata X4-2.
What was my experience with deployment of the solution?
We didn’t encounter any issue during the deployment of Oracle Linux for many different platforms.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
We have had no issues with the stability. The OS is stable and reliable on a hardware layer stack, and Oracle has done a very good job of that. Oracle has done a good job of validating hardware Oracle Linux Hardware Certification List. We are very happy with the investment we have made.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
There have been no issues scaling it.
How are customer service and technical support?
Oracle provides enterprise-level support for Oracle Linux:
- Zero-downtime kernel updates with Ksplice.
- Management and clustering software is included at no additional charge.
- Includes premier backports, legal indemnification, and full-stack testing.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We used Red Hat, Solaris x86-64 bit, but we chose Oracle Linux for the reasons above.
How was the initial setup?
Oracle Linux is straightforward in its initial setup because it comes with a pre-installed package that for installation of other Oracle products or Oracle Database on Oracle Linux with UEK. The pre-installed package download includes a software package, repertories, and specific versions needed for application installation.
What about the implementation team?
In-house. For this environment, the greatest value gained from implementing Oracle Linux resulted from implementing the management pack components and clustering software that we would have to pay for otherwise. Another was very specific with regard to the value of Ksplice, with which we can update our environment with latest patches and updates with zero-downtime.
What was our ROI?
From our review of Oracle Linux software and support, we believe that tangible ROI benefits can be realized from consolidating the enterprise Linux environment to Oracle Linux.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Pricing/licensing is much lower than other commercial Linux distributions. For Oracle Linux support is available at Basic and Premier levels via a yearly subscription that includes support for the UEK and/or the Red Hat Compatible Kernel. Support levels can be assigned on a per-physical server basis. Customers can choose either Oracle’s Enterprise manager (included with Basic and Premier Support licenses) or Oracle’s release of Spacewalk for Oracle Linux. Pricing is calculated on a per-system basis and varies with the level of support from Basic to Premier. A free support option is also available.
What other advice do I have?
I have recommend Oracle Linux for the reason Oracle is the only vendor in the industry that offers a complete Linux-based solution stack—applications, middleware, database, management tools, operating system and hardware—along with a single point of support. Customers that deploy Oracle Linux benefit greatly from the latest Linux innovations as well as rigorous testing with real world workloads. IT departments can deploy applications more quickly using lightweight Linux Containers and Docker images, or combine these approaches to improve application isolation, resource control, and rapid provisioning.
Traditional virtualization using Oracle VM can be an optimal approach for Tier 1 applications or when application requirements dictate the need for multiple operating systems. To deliver applications as private cloud services, Oracle OpenStack technology may be an ideal approach in conjunction with Oracle VM. In any of these deployment scenarios, Oracle Linux can add value through its optimized performance and scalability and the ability to perform seamless, zero-downtime upgrades with Ksplice.
As the number of application environments expands across data centers, managing them on a day-to-day basis becomes a greater administrative challenge and expense. Customers that have Oracle Linux Premier Support contracts can use Ksplice to help keep their critical application environments—whether using containers, VMs, or OpenStack compute nodes—updated with the latest security errata and bug fixes, without interruption.
And Oracle’s comprehensive support—providing support for Docker and OpenStack as a part of Oracle Linux Premier Support—helps IT organizations innovate and evolve cost-effectively.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
IT Project Manager at Awash International Bank
A stable, scalable solution with no fees
Pros and Cons
- "The most valuable feature is the ease of the commands which take little time to learn."
- "The solution can be improved by making it more user-friendly for basic users to reduce the time it takes to learn the commands and to reduce the dependencies that come with the OS so the deployment time can be reduced."
What is our primary use case?
The primary use case of the solution was for educational purposes at first and also used on some web-based applications, that require a Linux-based operating system.
What is most valuable?
The most valuable feature is the ease of the commands which take little time to learn.
What needs improvement?
The solution can be improved by making it more user-friendly for basic users to reduce the time it takes to learn the commands and to reduce the dependencies that come with the OS so the deployment time can be reduced.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using the solution for three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The solution is stable and we have been using it for over ten years.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The solution is scalable.
How are customer service and support?
The tech support for this solution has always been on point.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Previous to using this solution I used TinyOS.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup is straightforward and took about two days.
What about the implementation team?
The implementation was completed through a vendor.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The solution has no fees.
What other advice do I have?
I give the solution an eight out of ten.
The solution required over ten administrators to deploy.
I recommend the solution to others.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

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