Oracle's Take On Red Hat Linux 165
darthcamaro writes "For nearly three years, Oracle has had its own version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, claiming the two versions are essentially the same thing. But are they really? As it turns out, there are a few things on which Oracle and Red Hat do not see eye-to-eye, including file systems and virtualization. The article quotes Wim Coekaerts, Oracle's director of Linux engineering, saying, 'A lot of people think Oracle is doing Enterprise Linux as just basically a rip off of Red Hat but that's not what this is about. ... This is about a support program, and wanting to offer quality Linux OS support to customers that need it. The Linux distribution part is there just to make sure people can get a freely available Linux operating system that is fully supported.'"
Re:cant we already get free and support with cento (Score:4, Informative)
Oracle Cluster File System. Whether you need it or not is up to you. Oracle also provides OCFS modules for Red Hat to make it easy on people.
Re:cant we already get free and support with cento (Score:2, Informative)
Also, RedHat and CentOS are the same product. They are the same source code: RedHat compiled by RedHat, and CentOS compiled by open source community. This allows RedHat to get more exposure and most of the bugs found in CentOS can be patched back into RedHat.
Re:Um, (Score:5, Informative)
Um, so basically it is a rip off of Red Hat just with Red Hat stripped out and Oracle's own filesystem added to the kernel
No no no no no.
The default filesystem shipped with RHEL and OUL is ext3. The clustered file-system shipped with RHEL is GFS, and with OUL it is OCFS2. OCFS2 is not compiled in-kernel within Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and must be mod-probed in as a separate - unsupported by Red Hat - module.
> with a different VM.
Again, wrong. RHEL 5 ships with Xen, and will support Xen until at least 2014. OUL also ships with Xen. Please remember, KVM has not shipped in *any* RHEL release (major or minor) yet. Only Red Hat internally knows the release agenda.
> Thats it. Still maintains binary compatibility, > etc.
Oracle's binary compatibility claims are a myth.
Re:Is anyone actually using Oracle Linux? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Some reasons for the Oracle case (Score:1, Informative)
1) Linux (RedHat or others) are really stable systems (compared with other Unixes they had or have)
Really? What might these other "Unixes" be?
Linux has gotten fairly stable in the last couple years, but I don't really think all that many people would hold it up as the gold standard.
I have Solaris boxes that have been up since before the 2.6 Linux kernel was released.
Re:cant we already get free and support with cento (Score:5, Informative)
i've never bothered to look at oracle linux, because i can get 'free' redhat through centos, and when i want paid support, i can get it directly through redhat.
without some other differentiation, what is oracle providing that isnt there from the others?
so yes, it is just a rip off of red hat.
You would ONLY use Oracle Linux to run your Oracle products on. You wouldn't use it for your file and print, or web server. They wouldn't want you to anyway.
It's largely a marketing thing. If you run your Oracle products on Oracle Linux, Oracle will support the entire software stack. That can be important to a lot of enterprise customers, no turf wars about who's fault it isn't.
As a bonus, the Oracle Linux support contract is (and should be) significantly cheaper than Red Hat (or Novell - the other supported Linux vendor). This is because they really only support those functions that are required to run the Oracle products. They aren't interested in supporting your file and print server etc. Whereas Red Hat and Novell have to support everything.
Can you imagine what Oracle would say if you had an issue that was borderline Oracle / OS and you were running CentOS? Even though CentOS is a re-badged Red Hat, it isn't Red Hat, and it isn't on Oracle's supported OS list.
The sensible thing to do would be to run Oracle Linux for your Oracle products and Red Hat (or CentOS if you didn't want support) for everything else. As they are all virtually the same, it's a lot easier for your administrators.
Re:Oracle's kernel developers? (Score:1, Informative)
Actually, they are not the only game in town. There is DB2 on IBM mainframe. That really does provide peace of mind as long as you can pay the bills. The user interface is even worse and they are for people that think cobol is still a hip language, but IBM does understand what it means to deliver a fault tolerant system with hot standby spread over different sites. Oh and they are even longer in business than Oracle.
Re:Quality Support? (Score:3, Informative)
Oracle Metalink [oracle.com] now requires flash to work at all. I mean, it is sort of like using GIMP to edit text files.
Not sure about your other claims, but this one is just a flat out lie. Right on the front page of Metalink is a selector where you can choose to login to the "classic" HTML-only site instead of using the whizbang Flash version.
Re:cant we already get free and support with cento (Score:3, Informative)
PostgreSQL, unless there is some feature PostgreSQL is missing that I would need for the given application in the foreseeable future.
Their product is just not that good (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Total Flamebait (Score:3, Informative)
I ranted a bit more completely elsewhere, but I'm basically saying that I don't think Oracle is doing this the right way.
I am reminded of this [youtube.com].
Re:Quality Support? (Score:2, Informative)
Later this year, Oracle will retire the Classic MetaLink support portal and provide a single support interface through My Oracle Support.
So it does appear that it won't take too long before you'll be unable to use Metalink without flash.
Re:Oracle understands business (Score:3, Informative)
Funny, I work for a U.S. company with more than 50,000 employees. We've got IBM mainframes, AIX, a little Solaris, a little HP-UX, Windows 2003 servers, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We've got some old databases on the mainframes that have been running the bread and butter apps of our business for more than 30 years, DB2, Oracle, MS-SQL, a little MySQL, a little postgresql. Our use of Oracle is limited to a single relatively large application that happens to be hosted on our HP-UX environment. Still, it's dwarfed by the traffic that flows through all of the other systems.
If I suggested to my senior management that we should move any of our OS support over to a database vendor who had just gotten into the game (and oh by the way, the OS is tweaked heavily to support a database that has very limited deployment), I'd be laughed out of the room. Especially when it's from a vendor like Oracle that has historically has given us rotten service in the first place.
We buy appliances for single purpose applications, not server farms. I'd be told to come back with a vendor with a proven track record.
So, let's revisit this question in 5 or 10 years. If Oracle has developed a proven track record of consistent support over time, developed a more generic distro (or created a black box deployment model), and vastly improved their customer service, we'll talk. :)
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)