Oracle Linux is a complete enterprise Linux solution available from Oracle. In fact, it is, we firmly believe, the best enterprise Linux solution available. Both for generic use of Linux and in particular and especially when using any Oracle product on top of it. So it is important to remember and understand that Oracle Linux is not just for running Oracle products on top of Linux. Oracle Linux is a complete generic Linux distribution that's fully supported underneath any Linux application. There are no restrictions from our end as to what you can run on it (as long as they're apps built to run on Linux, of course and any application that runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux will run the same on the corresponding Oracle Linux version). You can run 3rd party Linux applications just fine. Use it as an NFS server, as a webserver or whatever you want to use the system for. Many customers I talk to somehow believe that it's unique for Oracle products and I have to point out that while we have great, unique advantages and extra benefits running Oracle products on Oracle Linux, it's certainly not in anyway restricted for that. It's the opposite, all you needs is Oracle Linux for any and every Linux server in house.
Why the best, you ask? Well, we do an incredibly amount of testing on a daily basis (1000's of servers run various types of QA on Oracle Linux amounting to over 100,000 hours of QA happening every single day), we have a huge amount of internal use as consumers (end-user/customer use), we have many years of experience helping enterprise customers in general and we extend that down to Operating System support. We can scale using the greater Oracle infrastructure, etc.
The support team is a large group of dedicated professionals globally that are trained to handle serious issues, deal with mission critical environments and cases, know their product, have a focus on server use first and foremost, understand, in particular, also the other products around it enough (like, to be able to understand that ASM doesn't stand for -assembler language- (in our customer-base) but stands for automatic storage management (you laugh? I can assure you it's not a joke)) A single phone call: if a database problem is an OS issue, no worries, we deal with it internally, no need to go call someone else that might think a database is a dirty word, or someone that 's an expert in gnome (no offense) but not quite in a complex environment where you have a product use 50GB of RAM and has 2000 processes running and is doing massive amounts of IO and woops something is going wrong. "Reboot?" doesn't cut it.
When we do Linux development, the focus is basically on two things. 1) find ways to enhance Linux to run our products better (in ways that are generic, and also help other applications). A database does disk/network IO, lots of processes, lots of memory access, if we make our product run better, others also benefit... 2) help make Linux a better OS. improve stability, help add features that an OS needs, unrelated to our own product stack but important for customers to run the operating system, no matter what application. Having access to in-house hardware such as very big x64 servers like the x4800 (4TB ram, 160 threads) and TB and TB of storage allows us to test things at very, very large scale. This allows us to publish benchmark results like the 5M tpc-c result a few months ago. Offering the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel(UEK) as part of Oracle Linux alongside what we call the Red Hat-Compatible kernel gives us the ability to provide current, modern, tested code to customers without reducing reliable and availability.
A CTO of another company a little while back implied on twitter that UEK is too current and reduces reliability because the code is new. Can I point something out here? One thing we decided to do, with UEK, was to not backport features but instead just focus on stability. The goal is to stay close (but not too close as we don't ship a development tree) to the "Linus kernel" and focus on testing the heck out of it and fixing any bug that we would find, any regression.. This is good for the Linux community because when we do find a problem, we fix it and it's immediately also relevant to the mainline kernel. This helps us and the kernel community. We spend time testing and fixing, we develop on mainline and we don't waste time backporting new stuff into old versions. It's a symbiotic relationship. The alternative : take a version of Linux that's 3+ years old and take code from a more or less current version, after 100's of 1000's of lines of code changes and architectural changes have happened, and make that new code, somehow work in the old tree. The result : old patched up, totally unique code. Someone spending all their time retrofitting complex features into an old version. Testing is unique, bugs found are mostly only relevant in that version and not so much in newer versions unless they're greater design bugs or one liners. No one else really ever tested it because, well, it's unique, no other company is providing that seriously forked kernel that has 1+M of lines of differences. Somehow, I prefer our approach. At least the folks at SuSE seem to believe the same.
One advantage we have with our kernel is that we made it possible to install in an existing Oracle Linux 5 environment and you are not required to move to Oracle Linux 6 to get the benefit of new kernel features and new drivers and new performance benefits. Moving from one major version to the next is a very costly effort because you basically always end up doing a re-imaging of the servers. Most customers are driven to new major releases for a hardware refresh. We don't require you to do that, you can run both OL5 and OL6, your choice, your timeframe. You can reboot between 2.6.18 and 2.6.32 or even 2.6.39 (3.0.24) without problem, at any time.
The complete source code for Oracle Linux is available from oss.oracle.com (OL5 or OL6). The source code for our UEK and UEK2 kernels is available in a public GIT repository (UEK 2.6.32 or UEK2 2.6.39. Don't worry, it's not just a tar file and you don't have to go browse webpages behind a userid/password to figure out what all changed and try to piece it together yourself. It's all there, both the mainline kernel changelog and our changes on top. Transparent.
The binaries for Oracle Linux are available from edelivery in the form of ISO images of the installable DVDs for the major releases and all the update releases (OL5.1...5.8, OL6, OL6.1, OL6.2 etc). You are not required to first get a support subscription, you can just go and download the software, no activation keys, no trial period, production use OK, distribute to your friends? no problem, no need to remove logos. Errata/bug updates are available through ULN (ULN is our Oracle Linux customer portal where we have extra channels with extra software bits for subscribers, or from public yum (public yum is an open, free, no registration, no subscription site). All Oracle Linux errata/packages are published on both sites at the same time. If you have a set of servers where support is not needed, just a standard Oracle Linux, and then a set of servers where you do need support because they're production systems etc, you can install OL on both and you subscribe for the systems you need to have support for. One distribution installed across the entire company. No need to find a free distribution and a pay to use distribution. If you no longer need support services for a system, don't worry, we won't ask you to de-install.
But wait, there's more..
How about managing Oracle Linux... well, included in Oracle Linux support subscriptions, is the use of Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c and Oracle Enterprise Manager OpsCenter 12. This is management software that can handle 1000's of servers from a single managed web-based interface. It offers features like :
this is all included, for no additional fee. Any server with Oracle Linux support subscriptions include the above. No extra pack, no per server additional fees. Or if you don't really care for that and just want a very simple yum based setup, you can do that as well, just grab the rpms, put them on a server, create a repository and have your servers connect to that. So, very basic and simple, to very complete and comprehensive. Same cost.
And there is even more...
Oracle Real Application Clusters makes use of the Oracle Clusterware(CRS). CRS is cluster software that is capable of protecting any kind of application in a failover cluster. Not just Oracle. It is the basis for any clustered environment and provides generic availability eliminating the need for other third party cluster solutions. You can protect your own application using this enterprise grade clustering stack. Without additional fees. It's included in Oracle Linux support subscriptions (basic/premier).. have your own nfs server? webserver? want to monitor it and restart it in a cluster no problem? Go for it. Using the exact same software we use for the most mission critical clustered systems. Want to run Oracle Linux virtualized? 1 guest? 10 guests? 20 guests? You only need one subscription per physical server and we don't charge more if you run 1 or more than 1 guest. And how much for all this?
We also have a premier support subscription which adds the ability to use Oracle ksplice technology to apply your kernel security fixes online, while the system is running at full speed, while the applications are running, while the users are working, without downtime. And I mean apply, not just install. The installed fixes are instantly effective at runtime. zero reboots. zero downtime scheduling. zero administrative program/planning management.. Or premier backport support, critical fixes for a specific bug in the specific version of the rpm you run in a mission critical environment. Or lifetime support, now with virtualization more useful than ever before. Virtual hardware can remain the same for much longer than the support lifecycles.
See our store for pricing, and our Oracle Linux site for policies and references to the above.
Ok there you have it. Almost a novel but we just have that much to offer, and wait 'til I get to Oracle VM.. it just gets even better.