Oracle Linux Reviews

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.

Well, the most valuable features are not the technical features. The most valuable feature is more of a support case feature. They build the operating system, we also run on Oracle hardware, and we run an Oracle database on top of that. The big benefit is having one vendor to go to for your hardware questions, your database questions and the operating system in the middle. So it makes life a lot easier. In general, they know more about it. They are simple cases, because you've got everything from one vendor.

One technical aspect I like is Ksplicing. You can patch Linux without having downtime.

Those two combined with the sophistication from Oracle products on Oracle Linux sums it up. Ksplicing and a certified one-vendor approach is in many cases the biggest benefits.

In general, if they move off from Windows, they will see quite heavy cost-cutting. You've got some heavier costs when you move off from Red Hat and especially if you combine it with the hardware deal where you run it on Oracle hardware. You get the support for the operating system for free; it's quite a major case. That is something you can expect and see a return on investment quite quickly.

In all honesty, there are not that many additional benefits except for the money and the other items I've mentioned, in relation to Red Hat, because the operating systems are quite the same. It is more about the financial and support and Ksplicing; those are the main differentiators. But, in general, we see customers going down in costs when they move off from Red Hat to Oracle Linux.

Regarding areas for improvement, I think they follow the main kernel filler. The only thing from what I can see as an improvement is the level of adoption in the Linux community because I too often see non-Oracle products at first not being released or not being certified as Oracle Linux. You see more adoption in Red Hat even though they are binary-compatible. You often see that those extras are not directly available on the Oracle download repositories, whereas with Red Hat there is a lot available. And Oracle is quite focused on its own product stack. You can get everything running; everything that you can run on Red Hat you can run on Oracle Linux. However, it is not that integrated. It's no big deal, it takes you a couple of extra commands, but they could spin off more adoption by doing that.

In all honesty, I know that their graphical user interface is very basic, but I think 99.9% of people use it on a server version that doesn't have any display connected to it. Therefore, there's no reason for doing that. I don't see that much improvement specifically for Oracle Linux; I have the same stuff as for Linux in general. There's the adoption of specific drivers as such, but nothing specific for Oracle Linux. I think that they are a very good competitor to Red Hat.

We adopted Oracle Linux seven or eight years ago, when we started moving off from Red Hat. In that time frame, you're generally investing knowledge into Oracle Linux. I think it's around seven years or something.

I haven't seen any big stability issues with a couple of customers that are doing Oracle Linux. The only issues we have seen are more generally kernel-related, so Red Hat would have the same issue.

The big benefit is that you have additional stability if you run Oracle products, because you always have the guarantee that if you upgrade anything, Oracle software will continue running. You're not running the risk that you'll break anything, within reason. A bug is always possible, but if you're running an Oracle shop, running Oracle Linux makes absolute sense because it is part of their testing strategy to ensure that the databases work if they bring out stuff.

That is, in general, what I tell my customers: "You're running an Oracle database, use Oracle Linux." There is stuff in there that helps you run your database optimally and those guys always have their own products in mind. If you are an Oracle shop, don't go for Red Hat. You've got the financial part, but also it's from the same vendor. They know the guys from database themselves, and they keep them in mind when they bring out a patch. That makes absolute sense.

With scalability, we have customers that are scaling up their machines, but also scaling up cluster-wise. In general, there is no big issue with scalability. It is really stable; Oracle puts out really stable releases.

I do not engage a lot with Oracle's customer support or technical support. In general, we do the outsourcing part. Our teams engage a lot with Oracle and we step in when things are not going that smoothly. If it is a really big issue and they can't find the root cause or a solution, that's when I step in. It's not that much, but every now and then I need to engage with those guys. Sometimes support is good, sometimes support is bad. I think that's the case with every vendor, but in general they have quite knowledgeable teams. What I see with Oracle is that they are willing to build you a solution if you can tell them what's wrong with something. If you find a bug, you quite quickly know that it's being promoted to the development teams. And you see that ending up in the next version, you see it ending up in patches. That's quite good.

There is not really that much to say about setup and the transition. It was quite a walk in the park for a lot of our engagements where we had a very simple transition, especially for databases. You have to remember everything is binary-compatible, so we just brought the new machines and moved over all the applications and all the databases we were running with Red Hat for those specific customers. We anticipated undergoing quite a heavy transformation, but it turned out that, in general, it was quite a simple transformation.

We still do that today, for new customers that onboard that are running IT professionally and say "We would like to move to a cloud-generated data center". We say, "Okay, you can stick with Red Hat, but for the same money, we can move you off to Oracle Linux and then you actually get a discount."

Because we already have Oracle Linux, we don't charge them for that and it makes our lives easier. Every now and then, you have an off-case where they did some funny stuff, but in general it is a very simple transformation. Nothing scary, nothing complicated over there. Quite easy.

My general feeling would be "Don't worry too much." It is not that complicated. It's a very stable Linux distribution, and especially when you're in doubt, you can always reach out to the guys from Oracle. That is, of course, if you chose to pay for it, but you can try this stuff for free. You can spin it off on a VirtualBox image. Just download stuff, just give it a try and you will see how easy it is. That's my general advice.

If you're an Oracle shop, it should be the first operating system in the Linux sphere to think about. Don't start doing stuff yourself with Red Hat or other distributions.

If you like it, buy the support. It is a stable release and in my honest opinion, I think we will see more and more that Oracle is optimizing their kernels for their software. In that case, it will continue to grow. I think in a couple of years, you will see much more Oracle software-specific stuff within that kernel. For the future, it's a good direction to head into if you're running Oracle shop and also if you're not running on Oracle shop.

We use the solution for big packet inspection and as an operating system.

We like that we can use the C++ coding while working with it. 

The speed is quite good.

It's mostly very stable. 

The operating system is fine. 

It's pretty simple to setup, and we can do it in-house as it is not complex.

The solution is open-source. 

The network interface should be modernized. It's a bit out of date. 

It could be more scalable. 

We've used the solution for one project. We've used it for a few months. I haven't used it for that long just yet.

It is stable and mostly reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze on us. 

The scalability could be better. 

We have two or three people using the solution right now and do not have plans to increase usage. 

We did not use technical support. We've never had a need to reach out. I cannot speak to how helpful or responsive they would be. 

I've also used CentOS. The setup and scalability are the same as Oracle. 

The initial setup is straightforward. I haven't noticed any complexities. The deployment takes several days. It doesn't take too long. 

We have a team that handles deployment and maintenance. There are about five people and they are engineers.

We handled the setup ourselves. We did not need outside help. Our support team could easily deploy it. 

The licensing is open-source. We do not have to pay for licensing. 

We are using version nine. I cannot recall the exact version number. 

I'd recommend the solution to others.

I would rate the solution nine out of ten. 

The product offers improved performance and it is easy to handle. 

It's very stable.

They offer an improved hypervisor based on KBM.

When we compare it to Oracle Virtual Manager, the IO definitely improved. The way it handles disaster recovery and high availability is great.

According Oracle's license restriction, so it's a good alternative to VMware.

The product can scale. 

There's always room for improvement in the product. 

They could introduce the same level of remote capabilities, which are available with VMware applications to build distant environments. There's still some room for improvement over there.

I've used the solution for two years. 

The solution is stable. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. It is reliable. 

This is a scalable option. It's in the same leave as VMware. it expands well and quite easily.

We didn't really need the help of technical support. We had our own people build it up. If we had a deep crisis, we could handle it. 

We switched when Oracle announced the end of Oracle Virtual Manager. We switched to Oracle Linux Virtual Manager and don't regret it.

I'm also familiar with VMware and would consider these both in the same category. However, this is a less expensive option. 

The initial setup is very straightforward. It's not overly complex or difficult. 

We had a cluster of two times four machines and split it across two data center locations and it was quite easy.

We have witnessed a positive ROI. 

While I don't have the exact costs in front of me, it is much, much less than VMware. 

I'd advise anyone looking to implement the solution to just do it. 

If there's someone around dealing with Oracle and VMware, my advice is just to try it as it's really straightforward. With Oracle, you don't have to care about the nitty gritty things. There are ways of partitioning it or isolating machines so that you have costs related to specific machines very easily. It's a good way to save license costs and have good performance.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. 

We used Oracle Enterprise Linux to replace a Red Hat Enterprise Linux environment because Oracle Linux rolled out a new kernel. We thought it might be more stable than our previous edition.

We have maybe 10 to 15 engineers using Oracle Linux to test the software environment. It has a more stable kernel than Red Hat Enterprise Linux. 

Oracle Linux is almost the same as Red Hat, but it takes a long time to download, in comparison. The download speed is not good. Oracle can improve their servers capacity, especially in Asia.

We have been using Oracle Linux for three years. 

It's stable. We use Oracle Linux because it has a stable kernel, perhaps, more so than other vendors.

It is a scalable product.

It's not easy to obtain Oracle Linux support from emails or telephone support. We tend to look at the Knowledge Base. Oracle's Knowledge Base is excellent.

It is easy to install and only took about 30 minutes.

We use Oracle Linux to test our software, and we also recommend Oracle Linux to our customers. We also recommend the purchasing of a license to activate the product. If our customers want to install Oracle Linux on multiple servers, perhaps Oracle could offer some good discounts, but these would need to be negotiated.

We used several kinds of Linux. Something like SUSE Linux, Red Hat Linux, Ubuntu Linux, and Oracle Linux but especially those with stable kernels. In some software environments, we do not need a stable kernel's performance level, but the machine may be stable in most cases. Before this year, we used Ubuntu. Ubuntu is speedy but not very stable. Its development is very quickly rolled out, and they change it every half year.

I would rate Oracle Linux an eight out of 10. Linux Enterprise is used in our customer's data center. The users may use a lot of server resources, so we recommend they buy a license. Sometimes they need to buy hundreds of server licenses, so the price consideration is important as the licensing is expensive. Our customers tend to use other editions such as CentOS, and other free editions. However, the free editions are not stable. Indeed, the free version provided by Oracle is not stable.

Our organization uses mostly Oracle engineered systems and appliances such as Oracle Exadata, PCA Private Cloud Appliance, Oracle Database Appliance, etc. Anything that is an engineering solution from Oracle, essentially. We also use Oracle Virtualization, OVM. These are on Linux.

Ksplice is the solution's most valuable aspect. Basically, what that allows us to do, is it allows us to patch and update the Kernel without a reboot. To me, that is the most outstanding feature of Oracle Linux.

The pricing is quite good.

The stability is excellent and the initial setup is easy.

Oracle Linux is downstream from Red Hat Linux. This solution has the same pain points. I would probably mention that fleet deployment and management could be improved. 

It would be ideal if they added a faster implementation of the security fixes, if possible.

I've been using the solution since 2010.

The solution is extremely stable. There aren't issues with bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

In terms of adding on features, it's pretty scalable. It's similar to Red due to the fact that it is pretty much adjusted downstream from RHEL.

We have between 50-100 users on the solution at any given time.

I've used support in the past. I'd say it's pretty typical. It's not extraordinary, It's fine.

We switched from Red Hat Linux. Oftentimes I work with the appliances and Oracle engineering systems on hardware and software, which come from Oracle. 

The deployment was not complex. It was very straightforward. How long deployment takes depends on how many OS instances are being implemented. A single OS instance may take about 30 minutes or less. 

I work at an Oracle partner company and assist clients with their implementation in my role as a consultant.

The licensing cost is fairly small. It's pretty much in line with Red Hat licenses. I cannot recall the actual pricing, however, it's my understanding that it's just a few hundred dollars for a CPU core per year. I would just say it's fairly reasonable and low.

 Oracle Linux subscriptions can actually come free if they're purchased with other products.

We're a partner and reseller of Oracle.

I would recommend the solution, especially for the organizations that could be interested in zero downtime patch-ins. That is what the Oracle Linux case flies provide. I don't think the same feature are available in RHEL.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

I am not an Oracle expert, I'm a database expert. From my standpoint, Oracle Linux is more compatible with the latest open-source software than other operating systems like Ubuntu Linux and CentOS Linux. I have faced a lot of challenges with different operating systems but it turns out that other database packages are not very compatible with different operating systems. They are not very compatible with Arch and Ubuntu Linux; however, Oracle Linux is highly compatible with all of the open-source projects.

I wouldn't say that we had many major challenges with Oracle Linux. I can't say it's the most advanced operating system, but I can definitely say that they patch regularly. We didn't have major challenges with Oracle Linux, to be honest.

I have been using Oracle Linux for more than five years.

I don't think that we had any kind of stability issues. Most of the time, if I remember correctly, we worked with Oracle Linux when it was a part of the private cloud. By private cloud, I mean it was in VM. Being in VM with limited resources, sometimes the software packages would crash, but I don't recall the operating system ever crashing. The issues we experienced were due to the software and filter packages, not the operating system.

Oracle tech support is pretty well organized. They have a long history of offering support for their Oracle packages. It doesn't matter if it's an Oracle database, an Oracle operating system; they give support 24/7, covering every time zone. They have multiple experts available for every issue you could experience. They can always be reached no matter what. They are very well organized with their support.

Oracle Linux is very easy to set up.

Oracle Linux is very much compatible with other platforms. Installing VMs is very easy. If you are installing on a hard metal server, it's still very easy. I installed Oracle Linux myself, I didn't have major challenges with it.

Nowadays, Oracle is very open toward price negotiation; they negotiate well with their clients. 

If you're interested in Oracle Linux, make sure you know the infrastructure of where it's going inside and out. You have to have a clear idea of where exactly your organization is heading in the future, whether private cloud or public cloud. These decisions are not made in seconds, minutes, or even days or weeks. But you have to have a clear idea. For example, if a company wants to use Oracle Linux and they think after two or three years they might be in a hybrid cloud, or maybe a public cloud, they had to make sure they aren't too dependent on the operating system. Whatever software packages they are using should be very compatible with the existing infrastructure like a hybrid or a public cloud.

Picture two containers that are very much independent: you can implement Containerization in Oracle Linux and the same containers can and will work well in both a private cloud or a public cloud infrastructure.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Oracle Linux a rating of eight.

Because nothing is perfect, I wouldn't give any operating system or any other software packages a rating of 10. They have bugs sometimes. For some extra points, they should keep aligned with the ope-source community. Oracle is very loyal to their own customers. If a client is experiencing an issue, they will work with them until it is fully resolved. But what about the open-source community? I think they should also pay more attention to the open-source community. 

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.