How many of you been involved in an Oracle EBS implementation? I am sure you are well aware of the complexity involved in the implementation. Not just the functional implementation, but the infrastructure implementation is a challenge in its own right, isn’t it? You need a database server, multiple application servers for different environments (Patching, Staging, UAT, DEV, QA, Sandboxes), and admin servers, web servers and load-balancers. I’m sure you know what I am talking about.
Take this proposal to your IT Director and they will be a very unhappy person after looking at the number of servers you need for implementation. And let’s not even talk about the timelines to procure that hardware, install the OS, install the applications, and then integrate it into a working technology stack…
This is where you should consider EBS-in-a-box, where you just buy one server and utilize that server to virtualize all the application servers and database servers on it. Traditionally, this approach has been fraught with problems, such as lack of visibility of performance issues and potentially proving very expensive in terms of software licenses, as in most cases you are required to purchase licenses for the entire physical server, not for the individual virtual machine running that software. Oracle has come up with a solution which tackles these challenges, cuts hardware, software and deployment costs dramatically and provides rapid, templated installation and implementation. The solution is called the Oracle Database Appliance Virtualized Platform.
We all know how the Oracle Database Appliance (ODA) is helping make traditional database implementations quick and hassle-free. Now using ODA with Oracle VM Virtualization, any EBS implementation can be fast, smooth, and cost-effective using the ODA’s Pay-as-you-grow model.
What is the ODA?
For those who don’t know what the ODA is, the Oracle Database Appliance is a database engineered system solution from Oracle which provides rapid, One-button deployment for a highly available clustered system, as well as being one of the only systems where Oracle support the ability to enable/disable CPU cores to control license costs. It comes with pre-installed Oracle Enterprise Linux and Oracle Appliance Manager. It is a 4 unit rack mountable unit (2 x 1 rack unit database servers and 1 x 2 rack unit storage tray) with every component redundant to provide high availability against failure.
The ODA X4-2 is the 3rd generation of the Oracle Database Appliance hardware.
Every ODA X4-2 comes with the following
- 2 Sun Fire X4-2 Servers
- 2 x 12 core Intel E5-2697 V2 Processors (per Server)
- 256GB RAM (per Server)
- 2 x 600GB SAS-2 Internal Drive (per Server)
- 4 x 200GB SLC SSD
- 20 x 900GB SAS-2 HDD providing 18TB Raw (9TB usable Double mirror)
- (Option of adding additional tray to double the capacity)
Oracle VM
Oracle VM was introduced for the ODA back in 2013, and has been expanded with each ODA release since then. During the initial install process of the ODA, a decision can be made to install a physical “bare metal” installation, or a virtualized platform, in which case the Oracle VM Server gets installed. The following are the main key components in an OVM architecture
- DOM0 Management Domain
- Oracle VM Server 2.3 or later
- ODA_BASE Virtual Machine
- Privileged domain for ASM, Cluster and Database
- OEL 5.9
- Oracle Database 11gR2
- Oracle Grid Infrastructure 11gR2
- VM Machines
- VM templates, provided by Oracle, can be used to create multiple VM machines
With Oracle Database Appliance Manager version 2.8 or later, the Oracle Database Appliance provides the capability for application virtual machines (VMs) to re-start and fail-over automatically between ODA nodes. In addition, OVM templates can now be created using physical-to-virtual (P2V) conversion techniques, or migrated from popular VM technologies such as VMWare or VirtualBox. As with any virtualized environment, the resources available to each VM (CPU and Memory) can be dynamically altered as required, to meet your performance and software license compliance needs. This means that, while the ODA virtualized platform has always been a great fit for Oracle products like EBS, you can now easily deploy other applications such as SAP R3, JD Edwards, Peoplesoft, and many more.
Oracle VM Templates
Oracle provides VM templates which are optimized for performance, stability and high availability. Using Oracle VM templates avoids any issues and speeds up the deployment process significantly.
At a high level, the tasks involved in an OVM deployment are:
- Create Repository on DOM0
- Prepare Target ORACLE_HOME
- Setup the Oracle E-Business Suite Database VM
- Migrate the Oracle E-Business Suite Database to ODA_BASE
- Setup the Oracle E-Business Suite Application VMs
- Post Install/Configuration Validation
- Final Cleanup
Summary
The Oracle Database Appliance Virtualized Platform can provide significant savings in infrastructure costs, time to market and can reduce complexity and ensure success. Contact Cintra today to find out if this could be a good fit for your next project.