[Cialug] CentOS upgrades

[Hasler, Chris]

I can confirm that Oracle is cheaper.  Employer has had a support contact for years, not my choice but in business, options which save money are usually preferred.   

We use Oracle's version of the Red Hat kernel and not Oracle UEK.  It does feel wrong that Oracle takes Red Hat's source code and compiles it into their own branded distribution and offers it at a cheaper support cost.  We only purchase support for a handful or servers, one of which is the server used to run the nightly repo download script.  Even though we only purchase support for a few systems, we have 900+ Oracle Linux servers which we patch from our internal repo.  This is all legal via Oracles own Open Source documentation.   We have not seen major delay in security updates.  

When we talk with software vendors and ask if they will support running on Oracle Linux rather than Red Hat, the standard answer we receive is: "If there is a problem that they determine is OS related, we would have to re-create the issue on a Red Hat server before they would offer application support", but in 10 years we have not come across any application issue caused because the OS was Oracle Linux.  I also don’t know of any instance where an application vendor has refused any support.  

Oracle does use their UEK distribution on their Exadata products (which we also have) and claims they have optimized it for better performance and have contributed back to the open source community what they have developed.   
Chris H.

-----Original Message-----
From: Cialug <cialug-bounces at cialug.org> On Behalf Of Dan Ramaley
Sent: Thursday, January 27, 2022 5:41 PM
To: cialug at cialug.org
Subject: Re: [Cialug] CentOS upgrades
Seconded.

Oracle is cheaper. (It just feels so wrong to type that sentence
though.) But their updates always have a lag of a few weeks to a month or so behind RHEL. For most updates, no big deal, but for security updates that *is* kind of a big deal. And also, Oracle doesn't seem to know how to keep a repository online reliably. Back when i supported Oracle Linux i ended up standing up my own mirror of their repo (and scheduled it to sync nightly) so that i had something i could rely on during maintenance windows.

On 2022-01-27 16:53, Matt Millard wrote:
> If I’m going to not someone for support of Linux it’s going to be Red Hat over Oracle any day. I’ve used both Oracle Linux and RHEL in production and used both support systems.
> ________________________________
> From: Cialug <cialug-bounces at cialug.org> on behalf of Mike Hughes 
> <mike at visionary.com>
> Sent: Thursday, January 27, 2022 4:25:09 PM
> To: Central Iowa Linux Users Group <cialug at cialug.org>
> Subject: Re: [Cialug] CentOS upgrades
> 
> I converted a couple CentOS boxes to RHEL and it went very smoothly:
> https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/linux-platforms/enterprise-linu
> x/migration-process/convert2rhel-how-to-convert-from-centos-linux-to-r
> ed-hat-enterprise-linux
> 
> ________________________________
> From: Cialug <cialug-bounces at cialug.org> on behalf of L. V. Lammert 
> <lvl at omnitec.net>
> Sent: Thursday, January 27, 2022 4:16 PM
> To: Central Iowa Linux Users Group <cialug at cialug.org>
> Subject: [Cialug] CentOS upgrades
> 
> Watched a good presentation last week about Oracle Linux and how they 
> track RH repos; the suggestion was that this makes it easier to switch 
> from CentOS to a valid open source distro that has commercial support 
> avaiable.
> 
> Any validation or problems from folks that have done a migration?
> 
>          Lee
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