The great Oracle Linux vs Red Hat Enterprice Linux RHEL Debate. Who has better support and who is more open?

( Hmm, now it becomes an Oracle Linux discussion… which is not what
I originally intended. 😛 )

So tell me how Redhat is less evil — isn’t opensource supposed to be
no vendor lockin? So if Redhat is doing this, then customers are
locked into RHEL.

A lot of people say that Oracle does not have deep knowledge in Linux,
as Oracle Linux is just a clone of RHEL — however, Oracle internally
uses Oracle Linux for most its software development. I don’t think a
typical environment is much more complex than the ones inside Oracle
(Oracle Linux is used to develop Oracle Database, Fusion Middleware,
Oracle Grid Engine, E-Business Suite and other Oracle Applications on
Oracle Linux — according to Oracle). Oracle develops its own
enhancements for Oracle Linux as well, not to mention Oracle’s own
kernel. I don’t believe Oracle engineers calling Redhat support for
technical issues.

And Oracle was able to roll out Oracle Linux 6 a week or 2 after RHEL
6 release, while the wait for CentOS 6 was months long.

I know that many people hate Oracle, but simply saying that Oracle
Linux does not work / not as good / not worth the $ is not fair to
Oracle (or any others, as we know that Redhat wrote around 10% of the
patches in the kernel, 90% of the code was developed by IBM, Intel,
AMD, and even Oracle — eg. BtrFS, OCFS). Oracle enhances Linux and
uses Linux for Exadata and ExaLogic.

>>>> It is less evil. And going to Oracle Linux means dealing with Oracle
>>>> support… or, lack thereof, and utterly uncoordinated support, for very
>>>> small values of “support”.
>>>>
>>>> It took me a *month* to get a box fixed, and that included two weeks
>>>> emailing with an engineer in Chile, and three separate managers “taking
>>>> ownership” of the issue….
>>>
>>> I also know someone who has good experience with Oracle.
>>>
>>> Even the free support on the Oracle Forums (at:
>>> https://forums.oracle.com/forums/forum.jspa?forumID=822 ) is good —
>>> so far I’ve posted 3 questions, and 3 of them were answered by the
>>> Oracle employees within a week.
>>
>> Um, right. Meanwhile, this box was under warranty, and had hardware
>> issues. And when I complained that the engineer in Chile was being pulled
>> off to respond to other issues, and so sometimes I’d get several emails a
>> day, other times, I’d email results of tests, and it would take him 2-3
>> days to get back to me, I got a new engineer… WHO ONLY WORKED NIGHTS.
>>
>> As a comparison, I had a similar problem with a Dell box, and there was an
>> FE out within two weeks, *and* one manager had “taken ownership”, *and*
>> when I had a problem a couple months later with another box, that same
>> manager contacted me. My manager and co-worker have had similar, though
>> not quite as extreme, experiences with Oracle, and we have *no* intention
>> of buying Sun/Oracle ever again.
>>

—–>

You’d be surprised actually. Oracle itself has admitted to patching
the kernel with certain performance tweaks dedicated exclusively for
their products; however they haven’t submitted the changes to the
mainstream kernel development. So, essentially they’re taking the
kernel, tweaking it, and not giving back to the community. Now under
GPL, they don’t have to release their code, but it still leaves a sour
note in a lot of peoples’ mouths. Especially because one of their
touted selling points is that “they clean up red hat’s problems.”

Not to mention they’ve only certified the tweaks for Oracle software.
That means they could cause your other mission critical application to
crash every 2 seconds, but so long as your database is running oracle
will give it a stamp of approval.

Also, they have stripped out a number of open source solutions in
order to include their own proprietary solutions (so yes, vendor
lockin). They have removed GFS/GFS2 and replaced it with their
proprietary competitor OCFS2. They have removed redhat cluster suite
and replaced it with the closed source oracle clusterware.

If any these things break, who can help you? Oracle.
If you’re using RHEL, anyone who uses RHEL, Cent, or SL can probably help you.
I don’t want to turn this into a distro war – Oracle linux is made for
running oracle databases. That’s it, and it’s very good at doing that.
However pretty much every other case you’re going to be better covered
by RHEL or its derivatives.

Also, Oracle/Sun support sucks. Compare experiences with Red Hat to
experiences with Oracle, there is a pretty stark contrast. Red hat was
first and foremost a company to provide support for otherwise free
software. Oracle on the other hand is just a money making machine.

I don’t care which one people use really, I use cent and SI for my own
work, and RHEL for production boxes. I still have yet to see a good
reason to use oracle.

—–

> You’d be surprised actually. Oracle itself has admitted to patching
> the kernel with certain performance tweaks dedicated exclusively for
> their products; however they haven’t submitted the changes to the
> mainstream kernel development.

Not correct — according to lwn.net, for the past few releases, Oracle
did contribute to the latest Linux kernels by sending patches to Linus
& the LKML.

> Not to mention they’ve only certified the tweaks for Oracle software.
> That means they could cause your other mission critical application to
> crash every 2 seconds, but so long as your database is running oracle
> will give it a stamp of approval.

Oracle ships 3 kernels with Oracle Linux:

1) 100% compatible RHEL kernel (ie. a rebuild from the same source)
2) RHEL compatible kernel with bug fixes done by Oracle
3) Oracle Unbreakable kernel

So if the application really crashes due to Oracle;s changes, use the
older but 100% compatible RHEL kernel.

There are over 7000 paying customers using Oracle Linux, and I don’t
believe Oracle would put changes in that is designed to crash other
applications.

In fact, software products that are competing with Oracle are built on
Oracle Linux, for example the Open Grid Scheduler, and Univa Grid
Engine (another fork of Sun Grid Engine). I am sure others might use
Oracle Linux, but I am more of an HPC guy.

See the example on this page, even the low level hardware interaction
code does work on Oracle Linux:
http://gridscheduler.sourceforge.net/projects/hwloc/GridEnginehwloc.html

> Also, they have stripped out a number of open source solutions in
> order to include their own proprietary solutions (so yes, vendor
> lockin). They have removed GFS/GFS2 and replaced it with their
> proprietary competitor OCFS2. They have removed redhat cluster suite
> and replaced it with the closed source oracle clusterware.

OCFS2 is open source AFAIK:

http://oss.oracle.com/projects/ocfs2/

> If any these things break, who can help you? Oracle.
> If you’re using RHEL, anyone who uses RHEL, Cent, or SL can probably help you.

In the end, in the user space, Oracle Linux, RHEL, CentOS, and SL are
mostly idential.

> I don’t want to turn this into a distro war

Same here 😀

> – Oracle linux is made for running oracle databases. That’s it, and it’s very good at doing that.

Oracle software developers use Oracle Linux for software development –
and Oracle does not only has DB products, it also has middleware,
cloud computing software, embedded software (Berkeley DB for example),
and Java!

So, can one really writes a kernel that runs all of the software that
Oracle has, but only crashes or slows down one inhouse application?

> Also, Oracle/Sun support sucks. Compare experiences with Red Hat to
> experiences with Oracle, there is a pretty stark contrast. Red hat was
> first and foremost a company to provide support for otherwise free
> software. Oracle on the other hand is just a money making machine.

If only the first who enters the market can do business, then we will
have a very different world then we have today. 😀

And how is Redhat not a money making machine? RHT is close to making
$1B in the next FY (FY2012?). And Redhat charges more money than
Oracle for support.

> I don’t care which one people use really, I use cent and SI for my own
> work, and RHEL for production boxes. I still have yet to see a good
> reason to use oracle.

I use Oracle Linux for my development & build machines, and the thing
that is good is that with Oracle Linux one can become a paying user
without reinstalling.

 

 

 

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