[CentOS] CentOS vs. RHEL vs. Oracle Linux ?

[Hakan Koseoglu]

On 24 November 2010 15:13, Scott Robbins <scottro at nyc.rr.com> wrote:
>> Nope, all comes as sda/sdb etc. if you don't use LVM unless your
>> external storage is funky.
> Hrrm.  Ok, this is installation on a VMware esx server, using, when
> asked to choose guest, an oracle machine.  Devices are xvda and xvdb.
Aaah, that's interesting. I've done it on an ESX 4.x server but got
none of those. On the other hand, I didn't say it was an Oracle
machine, just a RHEL one (didn't found it necessary to distinguish one
from other, we tend to deploy CentOS on our ESX server for test/dev
environments but we have a couple of RHEL and OEL ones as well.
That's worth trying again. :)

> Along with, I'm sure, the OP, I want to thank you for this post, it
> makes me realize that if we definitely do this for real, there are
> obviously some things I missed.
OEL is a funny one. The only reason it exists is to destroy the
upstream. They're completely unlike CentOS in mentality. Their main
reason of existence is cutting RHEL from support revenue. Our PHBs
decided to use OEL for customers since we're an Oracle shop at work so
getting all licences & support from a single source makes accounting
easier. In any case, after a typical Oracle Enterprise licence
calculation RHEL or OEL seems like peanuts. What worries me is with
OEL eating the support revenue from RHEL and simultaneously being
dependent on RHEL for upstream dev & patches, it's not a long-term
viable situation, it's not even a partnership.

There are other little things why we would go for OEL, one being the
OCFS2 when we do shared-storage clusters. Reading the small pring
gives you the impression that Oracle won't support OCFS2 unless it's
OEL. I'm not sure that's true but hey, that's what's been decided at
work.

As I mentioned, the other funny thing is if you choose
Oracle-validated package, it stuffs your sysconf.ctl with values. Then
try installing Oracle 11g (R1 or R2) on it, the installer barfs up
warnings about various kernel parameters being wrong.

There's a public yum repo but as Alexander has mentioned, not much of a use.

I'm not a big fan of OEL. I'd rather use upstream with paying
customers and CentOS internally. Unfortunately this decision is out of
my hands.
-- 
Hakan (m1fcj) - http://www.hititgunesi.org