Oracle Solaris vs Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) comparison

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9,996 views|6,082 comparisons
94% willing to recommend
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56,997 views|17,616 comparisons
96% willing to recommend
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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Oracle Solaris and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Operating Systems (OS) for Business solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed Oracle Solaris vs. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Report (Updated: March 2024).
772,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"It is a scalable solution. I recommend it for bigger companies.""The product's most valuable feature is partitioning resources and optimizing hardware utilization effectively.""The most valuable feature is the ease of setup.""Solaris Zones and Containers are my favorite features.""Oracle Solaris is great due to the fact that it actually is meant for high-end servers.""The stability of the solution is good.""One of the main features of this solution is the ease of use.""Oracle Solaris provides an ease of use."

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"We use RHEL in our infrastructure, which consists of VM and Linux. We use it to create clusters.""Its security is the most valuable. It is very stable and has many features. It also has good performance. Some of our clients were using Windows servers and products. I suggested Red Hat Linux to them and described the features. They switched to it, and they really loved it. There were around 50 servers in my last company, and they switched all those servers from Windows to Red Hat. I used to manage those servers.""The containerized platform will help us use ROSA.""The repository ecosystem is valuable.""It has improved our organization. It has standardized processes.""RHEL enables us to deploy applications and emerging workloads across bare-metal and virtualized environments and I find those workloads to be extremely reliable. The reliability is so good that I rarely find myself calling Red Hat support any longer. Support is the first benefit of using RHEL, but the second thing is that the platform is so stable that the need to use support is negligible.""We find the Red Hat Satellite deployments very useful. It integrates well with other solutions.""Red Hat Enterprise Linux's most valuable feature is its stability."

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Cons
"The solution is pricey and can be improved by lowering the cost.""The Solaris code is open, and the documentation is accessible to all, not only to registered users. Also, the documentation does not support some solutions, and there are no other options.""Setting up Oracle Solaris can be complex because it requires more commands than other systems.""Oracle Solaris can improve by supporting all the recent features that are in the market from other competitors.""The scalability of the solution can be improved.""I don't want to receive any updates on Oracle""The challenge arises from the differences in commands and configurations compared to more common systems like Linux.""Oracle customer service is slow at times."

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"The biggest thing that is crushing RHEL is documentation. Their documentation is haphazard at best. The man pages that you can use locally are pretty good, they've been fleshed out pretty well, but the documentation from Red Hat itself really needs somebody to go through it and review it.""We have had issues with the identification of new volumes when you add new disks or storage.""I'd like to see more of NCurses type menu systems in some instances. We're dealing with SUSE Enterprise Linux, they have an NCurses menu system. It's a menu system. It will write there. Even some of the higher-end Unix systems like AIX have some inner menu system where all the configuration tools are right there so your administrator doesn't have to jump through multiple directories to configure files if needed. I like the simplicity of Red Hat because it's pretty easy but having an NCurses menu when you have to get something done quickly would be nice.""Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a little expensive for some customers who don't have the budget. It depends on the client. They can save money by not purchasing some of the added packages and services. If the client has a budget of $10 million, we can go for the whole bundle.""Having an image that includes all the necessary software and provisioning it so that subsequent updates provide the updated image, would significantly enhance the developer experience. It would be great if teams could make modifications and changes to the image, like rebasing. I think it would be an awesome feature.""Network virtualization resources could be better. When you have any kind of trouble with network virtualization, such as with OVS, which is like a switch in a virtual environment, it takes many hours to find what is happening. Other vendors, such as VMware, and even other Linux implementations for network virtualization have better resources. It is much easier to escalate, and there is better documentation.""Red Hat's standard deployment is with Satellite and Kickstart, but we're looking at other options to help speed it along. We do have a mix of bare metal and virtualized servers and it's easier to spin up in the virtualized world versus bare metal. That's why we're looking at some options outside of Red Hat, for the bare metal.""The solution's operating system configuration and function selection could be improved."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "It is more expensive, but very complete and worth enacting."
  • "There is no OS licensing cost if you use their hardware and purchase hardware maintenance."
  • "If you buy Oracle hardware it's supported free with the hardware. If you're putting it on non-Oracle hardware, that is when you buy the support license, which is also very reasonable. It is $1000 dollars per year, so it's not overly expensive."
  • "There should be an option to install the solution for free and just pay for the support. We purchased an annual license and the price could be better."
  • "Its licensing is on a yearly basis."
  • "The price is not good and needs to improve."
  • "This solution needs a license to use it."
  • "There are no licensing fees but you can opt to pay for support."
  • More Oracle Solaris Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "The pricing is a bit on the expensive side, mainly because of the support they provide. However, it is quite affordable if you are an organization. If, as a small company or individual, this is an expensive option, I would recommend CentOS, which is an exact replica of RHEL, minus the customer support."
  • "In terms of the solution’s single subscription and install repository for all types of systems, we can have as many RHEL installations as we want because we have a specific subscription that entitles us to have as many RHEL services as we want. We pay for a subscription and with that we get RHEL and Satellite as well."
  • "Red Hat Linux is inexpensive. Linux solutions are generally inexpensive."
  • "RHEL is expensive."
  • "Because it is a subscription, you can go elastic. This means you can buy a year, then you can skip a year. It is not like when you buy something. You don't buy it. You are paying for the support on something, and if you don't pay for the support on something, there is no shame because there are no upfront costs. It changes the equation. However, we have such growth right now on the Linux platform that we are reusing and scavenging these licenses. From a business standpoint, not having to buy, but just having to pay for maintenance, changes a lot of the calculations."
  • "We have a site license on a yearly basis. Generally, we're okay with its price, but everything could be cheaper."
  • "The licensing with Red Hat is on par with other organizations like Microsoft. We have a site license, which gives us a certain number of servers, perhaps 25,000, for the type of license that we have. That works really well for us."
  • "We are an educational institution and as such, what we pay is less than the average company."
  • More Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Comparison Review
    Anonymous User
    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:When comparing Oracle Linux and Solaris, I believe that Linux is more secure and more flexible. It is also very suitable for enterprises that are already Oracle solution users. I found Linux to be… more »
    Top Answer:We use the solution as an internal operating system.
    Top Answer:Red Hat Enterprise Linux is fantastic. It is an inexpensive solution that has excellent security, performance, and stability, and also lots of features. I specifically like that the solution has… more »
    Top Answer:It is open source. We can customize it as per our requirements.
    Top Answer:We use open source. We only have a subscription for support.
    Ranking
    Views
    9,996
    Comparisons
    6,082
    Reviews
    17
    Average Words per Review
    296
    Rating
    8.6
    Views
    56,997
    Comparisons
    17,616
    Reviews
    137
    Average Words per Review
    762
    Rating
    8.7
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Solaris 11, Solaris
    Red Hat Enterprise Linux, RHEL
    Learn More
    Overview

    Oracle Solaris is a trusted business platform that provides consistent compatibility, is simple to use, is always secure, and is designed to help you run your modern and legacy enterprise applications. The solution is the most recommended enterprise operating system for Oracle Database and Java applications and is engineered for large-scale enterprise deployments.

    Oracle Solaris Features

    Oracle Solaris has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

    • Application binary guarantee
    • Unified archives
    • Rich selection of DevOps tools
    • REST-based configuration and monitoring
    • Software security assurance
    • Automated installer
    • Image packaging system and ZFS boot environments
    • Simplified system life-cycle, application life-cycle, and cloud capabilities
    • Constraint packages
    • Fault diagnosis
    • Service management facility

    Oracle Solaris Benefits

    There are many benefits to implementing Oracle Solaris. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

    • Portable and scalable
    • Interoperable and compatible
    • Simple to use
    • Infrastructure designed to scale on large systems without code
    • Supports a wide range of hardware
    • 24 x 7 support from Oracle
    • Portability across different architectures
    • Supports tools optimized for Oracle hardware devices
    • Guarantees binary compatibility for your applications across various Oracle Solaris OS releases
    • Supports programming languages such as Perl, Ruby, and Python
    • Mitigates risk and easily proves compliance
    • Reduces costs
    • Helps reduce planned and unplanned downtime

    Reviews from Real Users

    Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the Oracle Solaris solution.

    A CEO at a computer software company says, “The most valuable feature is virtualization. They have attained virtualization and it's quite simple to create the Oracle Solaris zones. The solution is quite powerful. Oracle Solaris is great due to the fact that it actually is meant for high-end servers. The high availability is great. You can clone and you can do quite a number of things with them. There's also the ZFS File system which is very good. Is one of the best file systems that there is.”

    Diego A., Oracle ACE - Specialized in Systems Technologies at Telecom Argentina, mentions, “The most valuable features for me are virtualization (Containers, Zones, Security, PDOM's, LDOM's) and Performance, ZFS, Debugging with Dtrace.”

    A Service Manager at a tech services company expresses that the solution is “Stable, scalable, and has easy installation.”

    PeerSpot user Marcel H., Oracle ACE Director "Solaris," CEO, Enterprise Consultant at JomaSoft, explains, “Solaris includes two virtualization solutions: LDoms for SPARC and Solaris Zones. Both solutions can be combined to create private clouds. Solaris Zones is ideal to separate applications and to migrate from older to current hardware. LDoms is very efficient because it uses the hardware hypervisor of the SPARC servers. Both technologies increase Security, because they separate the applications from each other. Using the Security Compliance Framework we are sure the systems are set up properly.”

    Shafiq K., Senior Manager IT Operations at a financial services firm, states, “The reliability of the solution is excellent. The security has been very good overall. We've found the solution to have good availability. The backup capabilities are quite good. The solution has proven to be quite stable so far. The product can scale. The solution is 100% free to use. It doesn't cost a company anything as it's embedded in the hardware.”

    Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a stable and reliable open-source operating system for running application servers, databases, web servers, and production systems. It is also used for cloud infrastructure services, BI, and disaster assistance. Its valuable features include support and subscription, ease of management and troubleshooting, integration with existing infrastructure, security updates and hardening tools, scalability, and flexibility. 

    Red Hat has helped organizations accelerate deployment, provide stability, control, and reliable updates, and enable the deployment of current applications and emerging workloads across different environments.

    Sample Customers
    Siemens, IVV
    Travel Channel, Mohawk Industries, Hilti, Molecular Health, Exolgan, Hotelplan Group, Emory University, BlueCross BlueShield of North Carolina, HCA Healthcare, Paychex, UPS, Intermountain Healthcare, Brinker International, TransUnion, Union Bank, CA Technologies
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm28%
    Comms Service Provider24%
    Computer Software Company8%
    Logistics Company8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm14%
    Government10%
    Computer Software Company10%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm28%
    Government13%
    Computer Software Company11%
    Manufacturing Company9%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company14%
    Manufacturing Company10%
    Government9%
    Financial Services Firm9%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business32%
    Midsize Enterprise8%
    Large Enterprise60%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business18%
    Midsize Enterprise13%
    Large Enterprise68%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business23%
    Midsize Enterprise11%
    Large Enterprise67%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business20%
    Midsize Enterprise14%
    Large Enterprise66%
    Buyer's Guide
    Oracle Solaris vs. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Oracle Solaris vs. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    772,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Oracle Solaris is ranked 8th in Operating Systems (OS) for Business with 48 reviews while Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is ranked 1st in Operating Systems (OS) for Business with 179 reviews. Oracle Solaris is rated 8.6, while Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of Oracle Solaris writes "Improve flexibility, automate DR process, and speed up recovery time using Zones". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) writes "Highly stable, good knowledge base, and reasonable price". Oracle Solaris is most compared with Oracle Linux, Ubuntu Linux, Windows 10, SUSE Linux Enterprise and CentOS, whereas Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is most compared with Windows Server, Ubuntu Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise, Windows 10 and openSUSE Leap. See our Oracle Solaris vs. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) report.

    See our list of best Operating Systems (OS) for Business vendors.

    We monitor all Operating Systems (OS) for Business reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.