Oracle: Unbreak my Linux Heart

Oracle Linux 5.6 makes Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel the default kernel after installation unless you perform a custom installation. Note that Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel is available for the x86_64 platform only. The Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel is delivered via the package kernel-uek .

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 ...

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...