Oracle Linux Reviews

We are using it as a DNS server.

We also have Oracle Vault and Oracle Fire installed on it. We are planning to use it as a model system, for learning.

The most valuable feature is its stability. I adore the stability.

It is easy to use. The patching, connectivity, and storage are all good.

The iSCSI support is helpful.

This product is very secure by default. You should be able to use everything that you want to use. If you need to employ any service then you should enable the security for it.

The user interface is comfortable and easy to use.

The GUI could be made more attractive.

I have been using Oracle Linux for three years.

it is very stable.

Oracle Linux is not really scalable.

We have two or three direct users, on top of 1,050 who use it indirectly.

We do not use any technical support.

We have also used Red Hat Linux, although we stopped using it about three years ago.

The initial setup is straightforward. It takes maybe two days to complete. the first day is for installation and preparation, and another day is required for patching. It takes a long time to complete patching and updates.

I deployed it myself. Only one administrator is required for deployment and maintenance.

This is an open-source product that can be used free of charge.

There are many different flavors of Linux but I haven't gone deep enough in them to compare them all.

Oracle Linux is a product that I recommend.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I think the most valuable feature for me, as a database professional, is an operating system that has been modified to have more stability in terms of drivers, in terms of the kernel. We have found a lot of problems using other equivalent systems when upgrading the kernel. Using the unbreakable kernel, we have been able to stabilize many systems.

As an organization I would say that having the same company that provides support for Linux, for the operating system, and also the software on top of it -  in my case it's Oracle database - I think that it's closer to having better support, a faster response from support and, of course, better solutions.

I think that the only improvement is staying up with the pace of the technology evolution. As long as Oracle Linux supports all the recent technologies, there are really no more innovations it will need. If the technology itself evolves, as long as Oracle Linux supports it, it's the perfect product.

You start it and you shut it down only when you need to, really, but it never crashes. I have not experienced the crash of Oracle Linux recently.

Well, depending on what you mean by "scaling," in vertical scaling we have systems at my customers that go up to 700 gigabytes. I don't know if it's the most scaling, but definitely it's more than enough to have good database consolidation on the server.

I think it's good. It's not really necessary, too often, to need support for Oracle Linux. Sometimes it depends on hardware drivers, if there is the necessity to have something special. But in general, my impression is that it's stable and we don't need much support.

Again, I have to mention that I am an Oracle database professional, so I'm really focused on this technology. Of course, other operating systems often have many more problems in configuration, in stability, they need much more fine tuning. I don't want to mention them but I will say that many customers are trying to switch from, for example, legacy Unix systems to Linux.

We use, of course, a configuration management tool like Chef Puppet nowadays, or Ansible, so it's really easy to maintain the system. But, even installing for just one server, by hand, now is straightforward. It's not a whole day of installing Linux, that's not the case any more.

We're quite heavy Linux users. We do high performance computing on Linux so we like a Linux which is compatible with several platforms, so we don't have to cross-compile for too many Linux editions.

We like that Oracle Linux is Red Hat compatible, it makes things very easy for us. We can move between platforms very easily. 

Oracle Linux has helped us to use some of the Oracle cloud platforms, it's made that quite easy. Really, access to that is why we use Oracle Linux.

Just keeping up to date with the latest releases, so Red Hat Enterprise having Linux 7 compatibility would be useful. Other than that, the tools that we need are there, we use the GCC compilers and those tool chains.

We've had absolutely no problems at all, we've never had any stability issues with Oracle Linux.

We run, as I said, high performance computing, so we run across several nodes at any one time. We've scaled up to 30 Oracle Linux instances talking to each other, with no problems at all.

Luckily, I haven't had to use it yet. Obviously we use some of the Oracle online documentation, that's always been useful. And any time we've had any contact with Oracle it's been fairly positive. So what little contact we've had has been good.

We didn't feel much of an investment because we use the cloud platforms, then it's an option to us there. The actual investment of just trying Oracle Linux out was very little, it was just one of the choices on the cloud platform, and it turned out to be one of the best.

It was relatively straightforward. Again, the compatibility with other Linux distros makes it quite straightforward, so we've had no issues really. It was very simple.

In terms of important criteria when selecting a vendor: support, and stability of the product as well. Obviously having the packages certified by Oracle, a known stable platform, makes it easy. We don't have to worry about doing an update and then breaking things. That's probably one of the key things for us.

I'd say try it out, it's simple to get running, get it onto a CIN and then just give it a go.

The most valuable feature in Oracle Linux is its design. Oracle Linux is built with features to align very closely with Oracle products and specifically the Oracle Database. For example, it’s delivered with the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel which is a kernel developed and optimized by Oracle for Oracle products.
It’s an important part of the system that makes Oracle Database so powerful.

The Oracle Linux system is configured, by default, to schedule I/O for database usage and this I/O management plays an important part in database performance.

Dynamic tracing could be improved. In Oracle Linux, you have some very powerful (for example "perf" or "systemtap").

If Oracle can deliver such tools like dtrace for linux (publicly), this would help albeit actually dtrace is delivered through the Unbreakable Linux Network.

I have used Linux since 1997 and Oracle Linux since its availability in 2007.

We have never encountered any stability issues.

We have never encountered any scalability issues.

I usually use forums, Google and My Oracle Support (MOS )Knowledge Base (a great tool) to find answers to my questions. I never used Support Engineers to resolve issues related to Oracle Linux.

I used Red Hat Linux solutions before, but Oracle Linux is better engineered to run Oracle products.

The initial setup is not complex. If you understand Linux basics, it won’t be a problem.

Oracle Linux support is not free but the product is free. You can use it and test it safely for your tests environments. As soon you run your production, purchase a support if you have to access patches etc.

We evaluated Red Hat Linux a couple of years ago, but both products are very close. Only Oracle Linux has specific features that can be optimized for Oracle products (Database, Engineered systems etc.)

If you are searching for an operating system build to run your Oracle products, then Oracle Linux is the best product to do that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The most valuable aspect of Oracle's flavor of Linux is that there's a one-stop shop for support to which I can go. I can get support for our Oracle basket of products that includes Linux and Database.

I like that it can run on generic hardware, which is definitely a plus over the proprietary hardware that we had on previous Oracle installations. This mean that we have a tremendous cost savings when we're able to run Linux on hardware for which we don't have to pay a premium. We'd rather spend our money on the software.

There are some features that might be in Red Hat Linux that aren't in Oracle Linux. I can't think of anything specific, but we had that issue about a month ago.

It's deployed just fine for us. We've had no real issues there.

It's been very stable. We've very rarely had any issues with instability.

It's been scaling just fine for what our needs are.

The support is pretty good. There are some issues with first-level support providing just basic, generally not-very-helpful advice, but they're generally responsive and help us to resolve smaller issues.

The initial setup is straightforward, if you know what you're doing. It's not that difficult or unnecessarily complex, but you should have some experience with previous installations for best results.

We implemented it ourselves with our in-house team.

Be sure you follow the instructions for installation, setup, and configuration.

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.

Ksplice is a really cool feature. The availability is maximized because it can be patched without downtime. Oracle Linux provides free Ksplice.

Productivity has improved as it is easier to deploy and use. In particular, various open source packages can be more easily installed and managed, and systematically maintained.

Ksplice is a really cool feature. The availability is maximized because it can be patched without downtime. Oracle Linux provides free Ksplice.

I hope you have a built-in package to visualize your performance and analysis tools.

I can install and use the open-source tools, but I hope to use the proven packages.

We have not encountered any stability issues. It was very stable. Safety is at the highest level and there has never been a problem.

We have not encountered any scalability issues; scalability was also very satisfactory.

Customer Service:

Customer service is wonderful.

Technical Support:

Technical support is very skilled and stable. However, in Korea, 24-hour call service is only available in English.

I switched some of my UNIX systems to x86. As a result of the U2L project, I chose the OS as Linux.

The installation was very simple. Installation was quick and easy with a few clicks.

We used to use UNIX. And I'm using some Red Hat and CentOS. I switched some of CentOS to Oracle Linux. We do it directly. We have many engineers with various levels of experience.

• Service continuity through zero downtime and low-cost subscription

Oracle Linux is provided by Oracle subscription and is equivalent or better than other Linux technical support. However, support costs are about half that level.

Before choosing this product, we also considered Red Hat and SUSE. However, we chose Oracle Linux to use the Oracle kernel optimized for Oracle applications.

If you convert UNIX to Linux... and if stability and service downtime are to be minimized, Oracle Linux is the solution.