Oracle: Unbreak my Linux Heart

Dell recently published a little more details about what Ubuntu Certified and Ubuntu Ready means . Even though Dell does not officially support Ubuntu, their hardware is labelled as Certified by Canonical and they can also provide with paid support for Enterprises that require it.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 Bèta is now available. Most interesting improvements, apart from the usual bug fixes, performance benefits and better hardware support, are the introduction of KVM virtualization (in addition to regular Xen-based virtualization). New hardware support in virtual environments through SRIOV ( Single Root I/O for Virtualization ), utilities for management of FCoE cards over Internet, FIPS-140 security certification and a libvirt Perl interface for virtualization. Read the release notes for full details. Better yet is this announcement: " An important feature of any Red Hat Enterprise Linux update is that kernel and user APIs are unchanged, so that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 applications do not need to be rebuilt or re-certified. This situation extends to virtualized environments: with a fully integrated hypervisor, the application binary interface (ABI) consistency offered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux means that applications certified to run on Red Hat ...

As we run 700+ VMs in our data center, 40% of which Linux BTW, this news is pretty relevant to me: VMware decided to make their Advanced Technical Trainings (PDF) - mainly used for in-house support staff and engineers - available for free! Previous VCP certification is recommended, or at least thorough experience with VMware. Source: VMware - VMware Partner News

" 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."

Slashdot | Oracle Contributes Linux Code, Expands Hardware Support : "Oracle expanded the list of hardware compatible with its Linux distribution and added support for Novell's YAST administration tool. They have now certified six hardware configurations able to run Oracle Enterprise Linux. Certified products include those made by Compellent Technologies, Dell, Egenera, EMC, Hewlett-Packard, Pillar Data Systems and Unisys. Oracle also said it is releasing an open-source version of the YAST Linux installation and configuration tool for Oracle Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux under the General Public License."

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

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.

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.