You can now get Red Hat Enterprise Linux on the Oracle Cloud

Over the years, Red Hat and Oracle have gotten along like cats and dogs. The main reason for this was that in 2006, Oracle released its own version of Linux, Unbreakable Linux, which was little more than a copy and paste of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) with Red Hat's name and Red Hat’s trademarks globally replaced with Oracle's name and trademark. That went over like a lead brick in Red Hat circles. Now, RHEL is available on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

No! Really!

I think this is something like Tesla partnering with GM to sell Tesla Model S electric cars at GM dealerships. Unbelievable!

But, when customers want something, smart companies listen, so, even though the Oracle cloud has a market share of a mere 3.28%, Red Hat has elected to support RHEL on the Oracle Cloud.

Oracle's happy about this too. Even though it's an RHEL clone, Oracle Linux has never been that popular. AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux both have larger user communities. To get and keep its RHEL family users, Oracle needed to support RHEL.

RHEL is available now on OCI. According to Clay Magouyrk, OCI executive vice president, "Starting today, customers can deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux on OCI and receive full support for these certified configurations from both Red Hat and Oracle. Deepening our collaboration in the future will see us support additional products and workloads on OCI, so customers have more flexibility."

Specifically, certified OCI virtual machines (VM) configurations can now run RHEL and migrate existing workloads already running on RHEL to RHEL on OCI with greater confidence. Customers can contact both Red Hat and Oracle support to help resolve potential issues, with an expanded, transparent, joint support agreement.

Today, RHEL 7.9, 8.7, and 9.1 are all certified on OCI’s VMs. These range from one up to 80 CPU cores in single CPU increments, and from 1GB memory per CPU up to a total of 1024 GB, depending on the processor. RHEL 8.7 and 9.1 are initially supported on the most recent OCI virtual machine shapes using AMD, Intel, and Arm processors. RHEL 7.9 is only supported on Intel CPUs.

Currently, the currently supported deployment methods available to run RHEL on OCI are KVM Guest Images, which are downloaded from the RHEL access download page, and QCOW2-formatted images, which are downloaded from the Red Hat Image Builder tool.

Ready to give it a try? Deploying RHEL on OCI is straightforward.

What about moving from Oracle Linux to RHEL on OCI? That, Oracle, to no surprise, isn't talking about much. It shouldn't be that hard.

And, finally, Oracle Linux isn't going anywhere. Off the record, some Red Hat executives aren't thrilled with this. But again, since customers who've invested in Oracle DBMSs and other platforms want RHEL, far be it for Red Hat to block them.

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