Why should anybody worry about Oracle’s tweaks to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)?
Internet News offers an overview of how Oracle’s own version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux does or doesn’t different from generic RHEL. The defining example appears to be an alternate file system that Oracle finds useful, but Red Hat doesn’t want to bother offering. (Oracle says it donates all extensions back to the community, putting the onus on the community whether or not to use them in Linux versions other than Oracle’s.) The question is:
Does this count as an Oracle fork of (Red Hat Enterprise) Linux or doesn’t it?
My answer is:
Who cares?
Why would you ever care which operating system you were running? Most answers fit into five buckets:
- Compatibility. You want all of your subsystems to talk to each other, seamlessly, with no hassle like patch downloads or research of glitch workarounds.
- Manageability. Similarly, you don’t want your systems administration personnel to have to learn any new skills.
- Performance, reliability, security, etc. If one version just plain works better than another, that’s the one you want.
- Vendor lock-in. If the operating system becomes less desirable over time, you want a good escape path.
- Direct cost. You want to pay the least amount possible for your software.
In this case, cost is close to a non-issue. Linux licenses are free, and if you’re an Oracle customer, you’ve already accepted that you’re going to pay quite a bit for annual software maintenance/service costs. And the other four points lose pretty much all their bite when the database management system is the only software running on that instance of the OS. Specifically:
- Compatibility — what exactly is at risk of not playing nicely with what else?
- Manageability — in this scenario, UI peculiarities will be small and trivial. The only real manageability issues would arise from actual decision-making, based on understanding of what’s going on under the covers. But hard part of that is understanding how Oracle itself works; any OS deals are quite secondary.
- Performance, reliability, security, etc.— if Oracle thinks some Linux tweaks make its software run better, it very likely is right. And substantially the only software running in the Linux instances in question comes from, yes, Oracle.
- Vendor lock-in — if you’ve bought into the whole Oracle DBMS, a couple of incremental modules such as operating system extensions are the least of your lock-in issues.
Bottom line: To the extent Oracle that changes around a few RHEL Linux subsystems, users shouldn’t be concerned.
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Early on there was an issue with proprietary drivers. OEL didn’t like any. Now it seems they tolerate them. If you run ASM/Oracle RAC on Linux I think your best bet is to use OEL – yes. As one guy told me, it is just much easier to deal with one vendor, if there is a problem with the I/O sub system. No going back and forth between different support organizations. But should you move your whole data center to OEL, even if many of your nodes don’t run Oracle Apps/DBs?
Virtualization is another you could pick up …