Oracle: Unbreak my Linux Heart

Oracle first unveiled its Linux-support program late last year, at its annual user conference, and announced that it would provide the same type of enterprise-class support for Linux that is available for its other products. Oracle's Linux offering was dubbed Unbreakable Linux, and is aimed at providing bug fixes to current, previous, and future releases of the OS. Oracle has signed up Yahoo as its first major Linux customer, announced the company's chief executive Larry Ellison. In a conference call to analysts about the company's financial results, Ellison noted that Oracle has signed several new support contracts, some for over half a million dollars. In claiming Yahoo, Ellison stated that Oracle had displaced Red Hat at the Internet company, as well as at other sites that he did not name. Red Hat responded by saying that it has not been replaced at Yahoo, and Yahoo's spokesperson Leigh Day was quoted in news reports as saying that the company's current infrastr...

DistroWatch has a pretty good breakdown of Oracle Unbreakable Linux , which packages are included and of which version. They also compare them to the official version of that package. In other words, GAIM is officially at version 1.5.0 and Oracle includes also that version. Another example is that kernel is officially at 2.6.20.4 (at this time), but OEL R4-R4 includes v2.6.9.

Calivia has a nice little "howto" about doing failover tests of your FibreChannel HBA cards on Linux, to test multipathing software.

Last week I tried to install Oracle Enterprise Linux, aka Unbreakable Linux, on our new PowerEdge 2950 servers. Installation went without a hitch! So that was good news. A look in dmesg showed the two Qlogic QLE2460 HBAs and the on-board Broadcom dual 1 Gb NICs were recognized perfectly. However, SAN people reported no activity or visibilty on the SAN fabric whatsoever. I started to read up on Linux multipath IO (MPIO) and found some documentation there. I will have to go back to the data center and try these thing onsite, as remote access is not working yet. The good news is that MPIO is built-in in Linux kernels since early 2.6 (something like 2.6.5) so by now, these things should be standard. LVM2 includes all the necessary device-mapper packages and utils, so everything should be in place. I simply may need to activate the device mapper with dmsetup or multipathd . We'll see...

the GccLinux Group site for Oracle's Linux disto "is to provide users of Oracle Unbreakable Linux , with a friendly meeting place to exchange tips, ideas, etc to get the maximum use out of using Unbreakable Linux. We here at Gcclinux Group feel that Oracle's announcement to provide and support Unbreakable Linux is a major breakthrough for all business owners including small/home office users who have a major need to run an enterprise quality distribution, but have been unable due to pricing schemes. Oracle's decision has leveled the playing field for all business users, and we fully plan on supporting this endeavor in any way shape or form possible."

Oracle's licensing terms have recently changed. The Standard Edition is now way, waaay , cheaper to deploy than the Enterprise Edition. Of course, you'll have to do without certain enterprise-level features"." But the question is: do you really need and/or use them? Many people think they need the enterprise features, but their actual application doesn't use them. Perhaps the development guys weren't familiar with it or didn't know about them and so on. So it makes sense to check and make sure. In the meam time, check out a comparison of Oracle Standard and Enterprise Edition 's features...

Last year, the Enterprise OpenSource Magazine website posted results of a performance study of several open source clustering file systems. The study was done in an academic environment and aimed to measure the same workloads on several different technologies. However, for the purposes of this blog, the difference between Red Hat's GFS and Oracle's OCFS2 are most interesting... Source: Kevin Closson

Kevin Closson points to a test Dell did using their hardware and an Oracle et-up usign RAC and one without RAC. The results are interesting! The tests are run using Dell's DVD Store Test Application using a PowerEdge 2950 cluster and one PowerEdge 6850 .

Oracle will support the Oracle software on Linux clusters comprised of RAC compatible technologies and supported software combinations. NOTE: The information in the given matrix applies to all Linux platforms (RHEL, SUSE, SLES, OEL) unless otherwise stated in the platform specific section. Source: Kevin Closson's Oracle Blog

Whereas Red Hat enables you to choose the support level with any particular server, Oracle forces you to use one overall support subscription level . So you can't choose a low, basis support level for common servers such as web server and high premium support for your database servers. This means, that while Oracle's Premium support ($1200 per year, 24x7, per server) is cheaper than Red Hat's Premium support level ($2500 per year, 24x7, per server), choosing that level, means all your 100+ server be charged at the same level, whether they need it or not... Something to keep in mind with large installations.

Sadly but expectedly, Oracle does not provide or support the Red Hat Application Stack . The stack enables easy development of web applications because its components are fixed. The stack includes JBoss, Hibernate, Red Hat GFS, Red Hat Cluster Suite, and Red Hat Directory Server. However, Oracle already bundles its own "stack" with Apache and Tomcat in the form of the Oracle Application Server . Oracle has made, what appears to be, its own fork of these open source software packages, and it support them independently of the public versions of Apache and Tomcat. For clustering applications, Oracle also delivers its own file system OCFS2.

Since updated code released by Red Hat takes some time to reach the public and then takes a few additional days before Oracle can obtain, process, verify and release the updates to their customers, you may be unprotected for a few extra days longer. However, based on experiences with CentOS, this is acceptable.

Since Oracle has taken a so-called "fork" of Red Hat's Linux sources, any compatibility that Red Hat has with software from third parties is invalidated ! There may be some compatibility - in case Oracle didn't actually change any of the affected sources from Red Hat (yet) - but these must always be individually tested and verified, either by yourself or by Oracle. So in case of backup agents, drivers, custom modules or tools, you must always test compatibility of the software you choose with your (Oracle) Linux platform. As a rule of thumb, any Linux software that is certified by the manufacturer to be compatible with Red Hat will not be supported on Oracle Linux, unless the third party explicitely states that is does.

Oracle Validated Configurations are pre-tested, validated architectures with software, hardware, storage, and networking components with included documented best practices for deployment. Oracle and its strategic partners offer and recommend these configurations to enable end-users to deploy fully tested solutions to achieve standardization with high performance, scalability, and reliability while lowering infrastructure costs. Oracle works together with all major hardware manufacturers on creating these configurations. HP, Dell, EMC, Emulex, QLogic and many more.

While Oracle is now pursuing its own "Oracle on/and Linux" stack, as far as Red Hat knows, the partnership between Red Hat and Oracle regarding the use and operation of Oracle's products on Red Hat Enterprise Linux does not change.

As Oracle has taken the Red Hat source code and modified it at least in some way, Red Hat's EAL4+ certification is no longer valid . This is of major impact primarily for Government Security applications and areas.

As is to be expected Red Hat has launched a major marketing campaign against Oracle's Linux initiaves. The Unfakeable website gathers all the links, statements and comparisons.

Last week, Oracle announced new prices for its Standard Edition products. Bottom-line? Cost is lowered upto 87% compared to the previous situation for Standard Edition and Standard Edition One running 2 or 4 CPU machines! As it turns out, prices have been lowered since Febuari 16th... thanks for telling, NOT! The move seems a responds to Microsoft's lowered prices and the arrival of multicore CPUs.

OK, I'll only do this once but pun *is* intended as I have yet to be pursuaded about Oracle's rebranded version of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux sources... You can get your own Unfakeable T-shirt in Red Hat's online store for only $14.50. It's a steal so cheap.

For work, I am using Oracle's Linux conception - for better or worse - and I decided to try and blog my findings as I go along. For one, so I can retrieve them later easily, but also to help others who may run into similar things. Hope it helps and lemme know what you think, if you have the time. Be it good or bad...