On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 10:58 AM, Paul Beltrani <[email protected]> wrote: > Feel free to take a moment to laugh, then please consider the following. > > 1) We already have a solid infrastructure in place to support our > CentOS/RHEL production systems. > 2) As Oracle will not support their product on CentOS we run RHEL on > our Oracle DB servers. (i.e. CentOS everywhere but the DB servers) > 3) In our experience, RHEL support is worse than useless. i.e. they > actually do provide negative value. > > Given that: > A) It is unlikely Oracle Linux support is any worse than Red Hat's > B) OEL is much cheaper than RHEL, ~1/3 the price > C) We're only looking to use OEL for our Oracle DB systems > > I think it's worth at least asking the question, does anyone have any > production experience with OEL they would care to share with the list? > > - Paul Beltrani >
My apologies for not summarizing sooner. I received two direct replies to my post. Both were using OEL for their Oracle databases and CentOS/RHEL for other uses. From a technical perspective it was working fine for them. Neither had used Oracle for direct Linux support so they were unable to comment on that. One of the respondents had an interesting story regarding OEL support costs. Oracle attempted to significantly increase support charges when it came time to renew. It took some effort to get the price back in line with the previous year's charges. I would also like to clarify my comment that OEL support is ~ 1/3 the price of RHEL. To be fair this isn't an equal comparison. It stems from the fact that OEL "binary only" support lists for ~ $105/year while RHEL "Basic" support is ~ $350/year. Given that I don't feel we're getting more than "binary only" support from RHEL, I'm comparing their minimum support option with the minimum OEL option. For the record, the OEL equivalent of RHEL Basic support lists for ~ $450/year. To summarize: From a technical perspective, OEL is working just fine for these users. There was no feedback on technical support Be prepared for Oracle to apply the crack dealer pricing model. Moving from RHEL to OEL is a reasonable option and may, at the very least, be a useful bargaining tool in discussions with Red Hat. - Paul Beltrani _______________________________________________ bblisa mailing list [email protected] http://www.bblisa.org/mailman/listinfo/bblisa
