[GSW]

Hi Chris,
Thanks again, I guess we have the choice of using the 60 day trial for the T5220
or consider a number of Sun Intel servers. Can we not run Solaris 10 on Intel servers as opposed to Linux (our own experience has shown Solaris 10 to be faster and more stable/secure than Linux)?

We normally use Sun hardware, so would therefore be looking at something like the SunFire X4600 (4 AMD Opteron Model 8218 Processors OR
8 * AMD Opteron Model 8220 processors).

Without server virtualisation, we would need something like :-
Server-1 DEV/TEST/TRG DB/Reports (Opteron 4 * dual-core ,16Gb)
Server-2 DEV/TEST/TRG Apps/Web (Opteron 4 * dual-core, 16Gb)

Server-3 PROD DB (Opteron 4 or 8 * dual-core ,16Gb)
Server-4 PROD Reports (Opteron 4 or 8 * dual-core ,16Gb)
Server-5 PROD Apps (Opteron 4 or 8 * dual-core ,16Gb)
Server-6 PROD Web (Opteron 4 or 8 * dual-core ,16Gb)

Do you think this is a better proposition ?

Thanks again for your help...

[nick.polites]

One thing I will chime in with is that I was never a fan of the Sun/AMD x4200 servers. Oracle On-Demand was using these and I found on random servers that they held a load of 3 for no reason. The best that I could find on the web (as I didn't have root access) was that it had to do something with Redhat 4 and Sun's Virtual drivers in the Bios. I would recommend anything but these servers, besides the new Intel Xeons blow away anything that AMD has.


Intel Xeon and AMD Opteron Battle Head to Head | Tom's Hardware

[GSW]

Chris, We will be looking at the Sun Fire X4600 (8 Chip's 16 cores). We really need to use a Sun servers so we can use Solaris 10 (for the reasons stated). Solaris10 will allow us to use containers, so we can segregate DEV/TEST and PROD etc.

Does the server config in the last post look OK ?

[nick.polites]

Just so you are aware OTM does not work on Solaris x86.

[chrisplough]

Just want to consolidate responses to the last couple of posts (I'm also in the airport, so please excuse the brevity):

• I like Solaris 10 on Intel as an OS. The container technology is quite good and works well. Unfortunately, you won't be able to leverage it on Intel for 2 reasons:
  • OTM isn't supported on it.
  • You won't be able to leverage JRockit - which is a large part of the Intel/Linux performance advantage.
• Should you choose to use virtualization of any type, I would recommend it's use in DEV and TEST, but not in PROD. With high volumes, you'll want as much direct access to the hardware as possible (this applies on all platforms).
• I haven't had any personal experience with the Sun AMD hardware, but trust Nick's opinion. I've worked with him for many years back at G-Log and he leads up our Hosting team. He experienced many issues (as he alluded to) while working at Oracle, and in-fact they've begun moving away from it.
• From my standpoint, it doesn't matter if you leverage Dell, HP or IBM hardware - it's all roughly the same and more dependent on support contracts, existing relationships, etc.

I realize a hardware and/or OS change may be difficult, if not impossible for your organization. In the end, the choice is yours -- I just want to ensure you have the best information to make your decision.

For TEST/DEV, hardware comparable to what you've spec'd is fine. However, for PROD hardware sizing, there is a lot that goes into it (we have a whole worksheet and Q&A process that we utilize with our clients). A lot depends not only on volumes, but on what OTM functionality you plan to utilize and details like the data retention period, etc. I wouldn't be able provide you with an accurate sizing without going through it -- sorry.

Hope this helps!
--Chris

[GSW]

Cheers Chris, appreciate your time (esp as your in the airport). We would use separate servers for PROD and containersr to segregate DEV,TEST & TRAIN etc.
For DR, we would have containers on the DEV/TEST environments that contain a production standby database and copies of production apps/web/reports services.
We would close down all but 1 dev/test environment and allocate nearly all of the resources to the PROD containers.

Regarding containers, how would OTM know its actually running in a container ?
Looking on the web, I can see that JRockit is able to run on Solaris 10 so a little confused here...

[chrisplough]

No worries. There is a version of JRockit which runs on Solaris, but it isn't the right one (OTM only runs on the JDK 1.4.2). Also, neither Solaris 10 on Intel, nor Solaris 10 with JRockit is supported with OTM. The supported platforms are (in order of performance):

• Linux / Intel
• Win32 / Intel
• Solaris / SPARC
• HP-UX / PA-RISC or Itanium
• AIX / POWER

As for containers, OTM won't realize it's running in one at all. We've just found that all virtualization technologies have a bit of overhead -- even hardware virtualization. Some have a large amount of overhead (VMWare) and others have little (IBM MPARs and LPARs, Sun Containers). Our internal policy is to use virtualization if it makes sense for TEST/DEV, but to avoid it for PROD, so that we're able to put the entire power of the hardware towards these high-performance environments.

Thanks,
Chris

[GSW]

Hi Chris,

We are now going to look at Linux Servers (RedHat or Oracle Enterprise Edition)
so we can use JRockit as recommended.

Config will be:-
DEV/TEST/TRG DB Server
DEV/TEST/TRG Apps Server
DEV/TEST/TRG Web/reports Server

Prod DB Server
Prod Reports Server
Prod Apps Server
Prod Web Server

All servers
Dev servers will start with 4 dual-core processors and will be upgraded to 8 if necessary. A Prod standby database (Oracle Data Guard) will live on the DEV DB server. If we loose production, dev/test/trg services will be stopped (we may keep 1 dev instance up), prod services will be staretd on DEV hardware. This approach is to be used to save on license costs and ensure we fully utilise all hardware resources.

Many Thanks for all your help.

[chrisplough]

The overall architecture looks good. The report server doesn't get hit very hard, so this one doesn't need to be as large as the rest. Just ensure you're using a solid storage technology with lots of cache and lots of spindles and a high-bandwidth connection technology like fibre-channel or scsi rather than nas or iscsi. We prefer to load our DB servers up with as much memory as possible, usually more than the other tiers.

As a reference, for our medium customers, we're utilizing servers with specs like:

2x Intel 5355 Quad-Core Xeons (8 cores total)

For our large customers, we're using servers with specs like:

4x Intel X7350 Quad-Core Xeons (16 cores total)

For even larger customers, we utilize custom configurations that utilize load-balancing, OTM SCA (scalability) and other methods to scale the load out.

Just remember that as your volumes grow that OTM takes a fair amount of tuning. You'll need to tune the DB, Java, WebLogic/OAS, Tomcat and OTM specific threads. Some of the largest performance gains, though, are around the functional config -- so having an experience implementation team will help ensure that you don't have poorly configured queries and Agents, which bottleneck the system.

Unfortunately, it's too much to go into here, but you're on the right track Good luck!

--Chris

[GSW]

Hi Chris,
Fantastic information, many thanks for all your help,
Regards.