[PLUG] Thoughts on Oracle Linux and Oracle VM

Chris Schafer xophere at gmail.com
Tue Mar 18 21:52:38 UTC 2014


So I have started managing  medium sized collection of Linux servers that
are all RedHat.  Most are physical although they are completely idle.
 Because of licensing issues we cannot add them to our VMware farm.  They
are all oracle DB or middle ware hosts.

However Oracle makes and exception to their horrible licensing for their
Visualization product.  Oracle VM.  This is a XEN hyper-visor with Oracle's
cluster file system and a web/command line wrapper around it.

I am also considering Oracle Linux.  Strangely their RedHat clone is kind
of a better deal then RedHat.  First of all like CentOS you can run it with
out buying support and still get all the patches.  The support is a similar
price to RedHat but slightly cheaper.  And they seem to be supporting older
versions of RedHat with more backports of code.  Their licensing deal holds
for OVM too.

So while Oracle is clearly the work of the devil I am tempted here as it
solves a lot of problems for me.  What do you Linux admins out there think
about this?

I would rather move towards a more open stack but the place I work is very
into large monolithic support contracts.  It seems like Oracle Linux is
Oracle's internal platform of choice.

Anybody ever used it much?  Or better yet dealt with their and RedHat's
support?

I just spend a whole day dealing with RedHat licensing.  Not sure Oracle
will be any better but at least with Oracle I don't need a license to run a
machine I don't want support with.

Thanks for taking the time to think about it.  I am interested in the OVM
not just cause it will get ride of a couple of racks of servers but Xen is
clearly the OSS contender in the Virt game and I have only play on VMware.

Thanks, Chris



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