Oracle's Take On Red Hat Linux

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.'"

Is anyone actually using Oracle Linux?

[lacourem]

Serious question. My employer has recently stated that they would prefer us to use Oracle Linux for future installations instead of Red Hat. Just looking for some insight from someone else who has taken the plunge.

Some reasons for the Oracle case

[DiegoBravo]

I support a software product in a telco, and had talks with its IT managers about the Oracle Linux issue. They have lots of Red Hats but see the Oracle offering interesting (and are implementing it) because:

1) Linux (RedHat or others) are really stable systems (compared with other Unixes they had or have), so the support provider switch is not seen as a dramatic issue
2) They can save some cents without (apparently) giving anything. The RedHat support is little money for that kind of company, but a saving always looks good for the directors
3) They avoid one provider's negotiation as a whole (which is a big win: less paper, less meetings, less vendor talk, less decision process, etc.)
4) They mostly ignore the distributed filesystem issues, and for virtualization just apply the leader (VmWare), so the Xen/KVM/Xen-Oracle discussion is not too relevant
5) BTW, for some diverse reasons, their software providers seem to dislike CentOS (maybe the RedHat's negative marketing made its effect, who knows)

ooh the controversy

[mutantSushi]

I'm not THE most knowledgeable on the minutae of these, but all the bad blood about Red Hat/ Oracle seems silly: The whole point of "Free Software"/Linux is that any company does not "own" code or software (well, they still do, but give up any claim to interfere with others' use of it). Commercial Linux companies obviously need to make their money thru support services. So Oracle thinks they can compete against Red Hat in this area. Obviously, Red Hat as the signifigant maintainer/updater MAY have an advantage. All the end-users get to decide it themselves, and since the code-base is so close, it's relatively easy to switch back and forth. What is the problem when "Free Software" is working exactly how it's supposed to? So what if Oracle eats Red Hat's business for lunch without contributing back? Linux will still be improved by those who want to improve it. All that such a scenario would mean is that (if it occurs) the model of maintenance/support service subsidizing development may not work for all cases. If that's true, then so what?

Re:Is anyone actually using Oracle Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Serious question. My employer has recently stated that they would prefer us to use Oracle Linux for future installations instead of Red Hat. Just looking for some insight from someone else who has taken the plunge.

What about any other third-party applications?

If you're using SAP, JBoss, etc., and they're only certified to RHEL (and not Oracle Linux), then there's no sense having two different distributions. Try to keep things as cookie-cutter as possible to minimize variables you have to worry about.

most U.S. business understands Red Hat == Linux

[rubycodez]

I've not seen Oracle Linux in any client of my company's data centers, and they include some with huge budgets (I.T. budgets over a billion). For running Oracle most are Red Hat, some are OpenSuSE, and a little bit of some others. No Oracle Linux anywhere.

Xen is a big deal

[btarval]

"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."

I hate to correct an otherwise good post, but that is at best misleading, and at worst just plain wrong. Redhat has announced that they are only going to support existing Xen installations, while providing a way to migrate to KVM.

Xen is dead with Redhat. At least for now.

Personally, I think this is a major screwup by RH, as I know of sites which had been stongly RH but are now looking at dropping them. Sorry, KVM just isn't ready for serious primetime. What's worse, is that the majority of Virtualization research out there is centered around Xen, for the simple fact that it's been around longer.

So Xen is the focus of the next generation of technology, and will remain that way for a while.

And before the KVM fanatics jump up shouting the usual "but-it's-faster!" mantra, you should be aware that Type II hypervisor support (ala KVM) was announced a couple weeks ago at the Xen Summit (at Oracle's HQ, btw).

So one can either choose a KVM type of hypervisor, or the original Xen hypervisor.

Oh, and I heard that the guy who did it coded up in 12 days as a lark.

But unfortunately one doesn't seem to have a choice with Redhat..

I certainly hope CentOS picks up the Xen work from Fedora this year. Otherwise I'll have to look to Oracle for serious datacenter work. I'm not happy about that at all, as I've been a very strong fan of Redhat (and have given them lots of business.

But this really underscores how good it is sticking with Open Source. At least I DO have choices.

Problem with Oracle EL

[mysidia]

Last I checked, it didn't come with a Yum setup, and you had to pay for support to get simple things like software updates and the ability to install software from their FTP servers, or from anything other their install media.

$99 per year per system for an update-only contract, and without it, you can't upgrade to apply things like security patches (until they eventually release a new version of the whole system with new media, for you to update using install media). That's not free!

With CentOS, Scientific Linux, etc, you actually get your security fixes automatically with yum update. With Ubuntu and Debian you get 'apt-get'.

Until/unless Oracle does something about this deficiency, there's really no reason to pick Oracle over the alternatives, except in the event you have to pay for support anyways.

Re:Total Flamebait

[reiisi]

Well, you know, if I start wanting to do something else with the hardware, I can always install RedHat. (And probably migrate to postgresql.)

The one thing that bugs me about Oracle's customization of RedHat is the question of whether they are giving back, both to RedHat and to the community. Maybe I don't look in the right places to know, but it sure isn't obvious that they do.

Actually, I'll go a little further and put it this way: From a potential customer's point of view, if I'm going to dedicate a lot of my infrastructure budget to Oracle's products, I would be a lot more comfortable if I knew that Oracle and RedHat had a good working relationship, both technically and economically.

(Cannibalizing the market is really not in a company's own best interests, any more than relying on the schoolyard bully to protect you is.)

Re:Total Flamebait

[MoreDruid]

Yes you get support from 1 vendor, however I recently had to deal with that vendor. There was already a support case, all kinds of log files uploaded for them to analyse and after 1,5 week they hadn't found the issue yet. What was the problem? at 4:20 every night 1 of the servers in a cluster of 4 went down. The issue was that updatedb was configured to run on OCFS filesystems, and updatedb is triggered by cron.daily. They had about 5 different engineers looking at our case. No solution, until someone from my company decided to dig a little further into the updatedb config. It seems that you shouldn't run updatedb on OCFS filesystems (we have another customer who has been doing that for more than half a year with way more nodes concurrently connected, but hey). Note: this happened after issuing a Oracle CRS (cluster software) update, the config had been running fine for more than a year. And Oracle support just kept on looking to the Oracle part, ignoring the OS stack. From Oracle Applications support I was told to "just update glibc from 3.2 to 4.x because there's a bug that's fixed in 3.6". Right. Break compatibility with all your major tooling and applications so you can run an Oracle App because they've been too lazy to test in an "old" environment (RHEL 4 U4).

In short: I'd rather deal with 2 or 3 independent vendors who know their shit (and know it well), than with 1 vendor who would - even when told differently - kept looking from the wrong POV.

Re:cant we already get free and support with cento

[MoreDruid]

That's the point: they are definately NOT the same. Yes, its based on Red Hat, but there are so many differences on Unbreakable Linux (here we call it Broken Linux) that annoy the hell out of you. The cluster application Oracle sold to our customer is not cluster aware (how did they do that?), furthermore the cluster service needs to be restarted when a node goes down (WTF? what's the point in having a cluster if one of your nodes can't fail???) and there are more diffences and issues. I've worked with it over half a year now. I've only had issues for those past 8 months with those Unbreakable Linux systems. In the meantime a cluster 3x larger - and much heavier used - is running without a hitch on a Red Hat base install and the same whole Oracle shebang on top of it. Go figure.

To make things a little more clear,

[reiisi]

Oracle is the source of the controversy. They are the ones strutting around saying, look what we're getting for free!

I suppose it is because many of their big customers expect them to play the predator. It's not the money saved. That's peanuts.

It's the image. Oracle provides a buffer between the dog-eat-dog corporate world and the touchy-feely alternate corporate world.

Re:Total Flamebait

[BitZtream]

What a gods damn minute! You mean Oracle told you to upgrade to a version of the software without the bug in it?! Those fucking bastards. The should have fixed it completely without changing anything, even a configuration file!

Seriously if this bothers you, you need to not deal with F/OSS software. Backwards compatibility is no where on the feature list, its almost 'broken by design' as those developing the code have no need or reason personally to maintain backwards compatibility. You have the source, you can fix the bug and recompile!

Sounds like they should have found it quicker, but acting all surprised because they wanted you to perform a system wide change that would effect many if not all applications. Why are you running Oracle on a system with a bunch of other stuff on it? If you can afford to run Oracle and a cluster at that, it would seem to me that you can probably afford to put the DB servers on their own systems. Thats what pretty much everyone else does who has been admiring for more than a month. At least it should be dedicated to its own jail host (or whatever your OS wants to call them). Application compatibility issues like this are something every major unix is designed to deal with.

Perhaps the Oracle engineers just gave you too much credit as far as your abilities? It really shouldn't have been that big of a deal compared to your crashing.