Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Plan the memory allocations to each component carefully, especially on the Original ODA. It's required to leave
8G of RAM for the Dom0. An averagely sized R12.1 application tier, running forms, self-service applications and
concurrent managers, might require 16G of RAM (be aware that R12.2 requires more memory compared to R12.1).
This leaves up to 72G for each ODA Base. The memory settings can be changed later if needed, but in case of R12.2
deployment on the original ODA, you need to make sure 96G of total RAM will be sufficient because there are no
hardware upgrade options available for an ODA.
The storage configuration options are quite limited and can cause one of the unavoidable roadblocks in the path
of installing e-Business Suite fully on ODA. There are two options where files accessible to the virtual machines
can be stored:
•
The free space on the two mirrored system disks (available space is 250G on the Original
ODA and 300G on the X3-2). These disks can be used to store VM virtual disk images for boot,
root, and swap volumes, but are too slow to host the e-Business Suite file system because it
would significantly impact the maintenance operations, especially patching and backups of
e-Business Suite.
•
The Oracle ACFS file system shared from the ODA Base domain. It can be mounted on
virtual machines using NFS, and then used as the shared application tier file system for both
application tier nodes. The performance is much better than on the internal system disks.
The ACFS volume resides in the +RECO ASM disk group, which also stores archived logs and
backups if no external storage is used.
The Oracle Appliance Kit versions up to 2.7 do not provide many storage configuration options for the ODA (you
can choose the backup location and ASM availability mode only) the available disk group sizes might not be suitable
for all deployments. Table
11-1
shows the problematic configurations marked in bold and underlined.
Table 11-1.
ASM Disk Sizes Based on Chosen Storage Configuration Options
Backup location / ASM availability
+DATA / +RECO size Original ODA
+DATA / +RECO size X3-2
Local / High
1.6 T
/ 2.038 T
2.4 T / 3.056 T
Local / Normal
2.4 T / 3.057 T
3.6 T / 4.585 T
External / High
3.2 T /
0.438 T
4.8 T /
0.657 T
External / Normal
4.8 T /
0.657 T
7.2 T /
0.985 T
You can see the disk size split between +DATA and +RECO is not optimal for e-Business Suite configurations.
It's not uncommon to see e-Business Suite application tier file systems as large as 300G (including the concurrent
manager logs and outputs). Also, two to three days history of archived logs can easily fill 250G to 350G of space in
a relatively busy system; therefore, based on these very rough estimations, I wouldn't feel comfortable planning
anything less than 1T for the +RECO disk group. And, the database size can grow quickly to 1T to 1.5T, which leaves
you with the only option for storage configuration on the Original ODA—the local backup location setting with normal
redundancy ASM disk groups, which provides 2.4T of space for the database and 3.057T of space for the shared ACFS
volumes, backups, and the archived logs. The situation on the X3-2 is slightly better, but still the “external backup
location” setting probably doesn't provide enough space in the +RECO disk group to comfortably choose these
options for a long-term e-Business Suite platform. Your situation will definitely differ from this, but I hope I managed
to outline the importance of storage planning for e-Business Suite deployments on an ODA. The storage configuration
can't be changed later, so careful planning is extremely important.
The application tier installation on an ODA is only possible if it's deployed as a virtualized platform, which
became available with the release of Oracle Database Appliance Kit (OAK) version 2.6. The virtualization on the ODA
is a relatively new feature, so it is expected to see many changes in this area, but in OAK version 2.7, there are still
