Exa Logic for Dummies

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http://www.dlt.com/


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Exalogic FORDUMmIES

‰

DLT SOLUTIONS SPECIAL EDITION

by Michael Wessler,OCP & CISSP

These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and anydissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.


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Exalogic For Dummies®, DLT Solutions Special Edition

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Introduction

C urrent IT systems are large, complex, slow to change,and expensive to build and maintain. Businesses need

to lower costs while increasing capability and improving agil-ity. Whether IT departments are consolidating the application

infrastructure in their datacenters or building out cloud-likeenvironments, Oracle’s Exalogic Elastic Cloud (or Exalogic inshort) can be a major building block.

Exalogic is an engineered system, a prebuilt and testedcombination of hardware and software for the applicationand middle tier, optimized for Oracle Fusion Middleware andOracle Business Applications, and capable of running a widevariety of non-Oracle software. Oracle engineered high per-

formance, high availability, and efficient manageability intoa scalable hardware and software machine. Exalogic scalesto meet any capacity requirement needed by the customerand grows as requirements increase. As a preconfigured andoptimized solution, Exalogic drives down complexity whileincreasing performance at a lower cost.

About This BookThis book consists of four short chapters, each written as astand-alone chapter, so feel free to start reading anywhereand skip around throughout the book!

Chapter 1: Exalogic Computing. We look at how IT systemsare currently architected and their pitfalls. Then we look atExalogic computing and why it is a better solution.

Chapter 2: Exalogic’s Optimized Architecture. Here, we getinto the specifics of Exalogic’s architecture and why engi-neered hardware and software solutions are superior.



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Exalogic For Dummies, DLT Solutions Special Edition2

Chapter 3: Exalogic’s Capabilities. This chapter looks at theextensive integration, reliability, and performance improve-

ments within Exalogic that support cloud computing.

Chapter 4: Ten (Okay, Five) Things to Look For in anExalogic Solution. Here, in that famous For Dummies style,we give you the “Part of Tens” chapter detailing the benefitsyou’ll experience by implementing Oracle Exalogic and cloudcomputing within your organization.

Icons Used in This BookThroughout this book, we occasionally use icons to callattention to important information that is particularly worthnoting. Here’s what to expect.

If you see an icon that says remember, you may want to, uh,remember the information. We won’t have deep meaning-of-life stuff, but it may be good to know for later.

Sometimes you just have to know a term or technical detailsto understand a larger topic. Or, it could just be that we wantto throw in cool terms to try to impress people. Either way,this icon identifies techie stuff.

This icon usually denotes something the author wishessomeone had told him before he learned it the hard way! Keepthese items in mind to make life easier.

Where to Go from HereHey, it’s your book, so feel free to jump around wherever youlike, or simply turn the page and just start reading.



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Chapter 1

Exalogic Computing In This Chapter ▶ Identifying the current state and pitfalls of traditional computing

environments

▶ Introducing the Oracle family of Exadata and Exalogic machines

▶ Understanding Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud

▶ Supporting very large systems and datacenter consolidation

C

urrent enterprise IT environments are a mix of highlycustomized heterogeneous systems composed of various

hardware and software platforms. These systems are expensiveand time-consuming to establish and maintain. A better solu-tion is cloud computing, which provides computing resourceson demand as a service in an agile, elastic environment. Thischapter delves into the ways that Oracle implements this archi-tecture with Oracle Exalogic, optionally supported by Exadata.

Current State of ComputingIT organizations are good at building highly specializedenvironments to support their applications — which hasbeen the standard model for decades. Although some highlyspecialized scientific or engineering problems require cus-tomized solutions, most business practices share commonrequirements and don’t require highly customized solutions.However, costly in-house business solutions with the follow-ing characteristics continue to exist.

✓ Setup takes a long time given the need to design, pro-cure, install, configure, develop, test, and finally imple-ment a solution.



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✓ Complex computing environment may be understood onlyby a few individuals who have institutional knowledge.

✓ Maintenance for a custom solution is continual and oftenexpensive.

✓ Resource consumption can’t easily be directed towardincreased innovation.

✓ Features are difficult to modify and grow as businessrequirements change and new opportunities appear.

These factors result in higher costs and complexities for theorganization while providing less benefit to the business.Individual components and processes can be improved, butthe negative aspects of highly customized solutions for rela-tively standard practices still remain.

Exalogic and Exadata Products With the acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Oracle came into aposition to engineer together both hardware and software foroptimized solutions. Complete products including server hard-ware, storage, flash technologies, operating systems, databasesoftware, middleware software, and application software couldbe engineered in a secure, reliable, and optimized configura-tion. Oracle calls these solutions Engineered Systems.

Oracle ExadataThe first product to take advantage of the engineered hard-ware and software solution was Oracle Exadata. The OracleExadata database machine is an optimized database and stor-age solution that offers a high-performance and highly scal-able configuration. Key items include

✓ A preconfigured hardware and software system using

optimized Oracle settings ✓ Oracle RAC (Real Application Cluster) databases

✓ A high-performance, fault-tolerant, and optimized I/Osubsystem

✓ Increased performance and throughput



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Chapter 1: Exalogic Computing 5

✓ The ability to scale capacity to meet customer require-ments and grow as needed

Oracle Exadata database machines support both cloud andnoncloud environments. The success of the Exadata databaseplatform paved the way to the Exalogic solution.

Oracle ExalogicExalogic is Oracle’s Engineered System for the application and

middle tier. Like Exadata, Exalogic is an optimized softwareand hardware machine. Instead of hosting databases, how-ever, Exalogic is designed to host Oracle Applications, FusionMiddleware, and third-party software. Customers deployingapplications on Exalogic will benefit from reduced complexity,better performance, simplified operations, and faster time tovalue at lower cost.

The Exalogic benefits that organizations find useful can be

categorized into three key areas:

✓ Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud computing

✓ Support of very large systems

✓ Datacenter consolidation

Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud One component of Oracle’s cloud solution is the OracleExalogic Elastic Cloud, which is engineered to support Oracleapplications and middleware. Specifically, the Oracle ExalogicElastic Cloud is designed to support:

✓ Oracle Applications, such as Oracle E-Business Suite,PeopleSoft, Siebel, and JD Edwards

✓ Oracle Fusion Middleware and Java applications such asthose using Oracle WebLogic J2EE server

✓ Custom applications, including third-party applications,not using Oracle Applications or Fusion Middlewareproducts

Figure 1-1 shows the layers of the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud.



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Applications EnterpriseManager

Middleware Platforms

Exalogic Elastic Cloud Infrastructure

Custom WebApplications

E-BusinessSuite

Fusion Apps Siebel

Shared Services

GridControl

Cloud Application Foundation: WebLogic Suite

Database Grid

Operating Systems

Virtualization

Integration:SOA Suite

Process:BPM Suite

Security:Identity Mgmt

User Interaction:WebCenter

ExalogicExadata

OpsCenter

Figure 1-1: Oracle Exalogic in the Oracle Cloud Technology Stack.

As you can see in Figure 1-1, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud pro-vides a platform for applications (Oracle Applications, FusionMiddleware, or custom) riding atop middleware technology.Infrastructure is provided by the engineered hardware and soft-

ware solutions including Exalogic and Exadata. All componentsare managed by Oracle management tools.

For database access within the cloud, database servers areinterconnected to the Exalogic servers. When that happens,the database servers are typically Oracle Exadata databaseservers, although standard Oracle servers or even non-Oracledatabase servers can be used.

Oracle’s storage solutions provide storage capacity. Thesesolutions can take the form of external attached storage or stor-age internal to the Exalogic or Exadata servers. Furthermore,the solutions can exist as high-performance disk, high-capacitystorage disk, high-performance solid state flash devices, ortape. Oracle offers many possible storage solutions.



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Chapter 1: Exalogic Computing 7

Oracle’s Enterprise Manager toolset handles the critical man-agement of these components. These tools can configure,

monitor, provision, tune, and proactively manage each com-ponent within the cloud.

Virtualization — the ability to create environments thatappear to the customer as dedicated environments but inreality are shared resources — is a key component withincloud computing. Oracle makes extensive use of virtualizationwith little administrative overhead.

The Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud allows customers toachieve many of the cloud characteristics described in theNational Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) defini-tion of cloud computing. Oracle’s solution provides custom-ers with on-demand self-service as demand increases, broadnetwork access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, and mea-sured service metrics.

The benefits of the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud include

✓ Shared resource environment to reduce overall cost

✓ Ability to rapidly increase or decrease capacity based onresource requirements

✓ A common, nonspecialized Oracle environment that isreadily understood

✓ High availability and fault tolerance via a redundantcloud of servers

✓ High performance due to optimized hardware and soft-ware components

✓ Easy integration into the cloud because it uses technolo-gies already present in IT organizations

✓ Ability to deploy most applications without any changes

✓ Management by Oracle Enterprise Manager technologystack, which is integrated across all components

✓ Backing and support by Oracle Support Services

These factors make Exalogic Elastic Cloud a solid solution fororganizations looking for a better way to manage IT.



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Support of Very Large Systems Some applications are simply too large to support on a single,conventional server. Often the computing requirements ofa system exceed those which are available on a conventionalserver.

Exalogic can be termed a “datacenter in a box” in that it con-tains all the necessary hardware, software, and high-speednetworking in a single machine to make business sense for

smaller applications but also provides the “elasticity” to sup-port the largest systems. Customers can move their systems“as-is” to the Exalogic platform and know that the engineeredhardware and software will not only support the processingrequirements but also will likely improve performance andthroughput.

Datacenter ConsolidationIt is very common for datacenters to have many more serversand operating environments than what is actually required tosupport the organization’s systems. Often, each applicationdemands its own separate development, test, and productionserver with all the necessary support components, such asnetworking, storage, software licenses, and administrators tomanage the system. All these components increase both com-plexity and costs for the organization.

Exalogic excels at consolidating many smaller, independentservers into a larger shared environment. Through the useof virtualization, Exalogic allows applications to have virtualoperating environments, yet they share the same hardwareand infrastructure resources. The applications don’t evenrealize they are in a shared, virtualized environment. By con-solidating multiple smaller servers onto one or more Exalogicservers, you can reduce the number of individual servers in a

datacenter and simplify administration — which dramaticallydrives down support and maintenance costs.

Datacenter consolidation is often a mandate in large govern-ment organizations as a cost-cutting measure. If you can con-solidate, you will meet these mandates and reduce cost andcomplexity.



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Chapter 2

Exalogic’s OptimizedArchitecture

In This Chapter ▶ Examining the Exalogic architecture

▶ Explaining how Exalogic scales to serve large environments

▶ Detailing the hardware components of Exalogic

I n this chapter, we cover the role Exalogic plays in a typi-cal IT environment. We discuss the types of applications

it supports and functionally what it does. Finally, we describethe hardware characteristics of the Exalogic X2-2 machine.

What Is Exalogic?Oracle Exalogic is an engineered hardware and software solu-tion. Oracle has created an application platform solutionthat benefits a wide range of today’s packaged or custom-built software systems. Understanding how Oracle Exalogicmachines are architected and operate lays the foundation forusing them effectively.

At its core, Oracle Exalogic performs the role of a high-performance and very efficient consolidation platform forthe application tier. As such, it is typically used to run theapplication, web, and middle-tier components of the followingsoftware products and workloads:

✓ Oracle Applications such as Oracle E-Business Suite,PeopleSoft, Siebel, and JD Edwards



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✓ Oracle Fusion Middleware (FMW) applications suchas those using Oracle WebLogic J2EE server, SOA, and

Business Intelligence

✓ Custom and third-party applications not using OracleApplications or Fusion Middleware products

During application processing, access to databases is thenorm. The database tier is very often Oracle, although sup-port for non-Oracle databases is provided. Most frequently,the Exalogic server will access standard single instanceOracle databases, or clustered Oracle RAC databases, oreven the high-performance Oracle Exadata database machine.Exalogic and Exadata rely on the same high-speed networkingbackplane. As a result, any processing between the applica-tion and data tiers is performed fast and efficiently. Figure 2-1shows an example of Exalogic application components.

E n t e r p r i s e M a n a g

e r

Exalogic Elastic Cloud X2-2

FMW and Business Applications

WebLogicServer

Coherence

Tuxedo

JRockit and HotSpot

Exabus and Exalogic System Utilities

Exalogic Elastic Cloud Software

Linux Solaris

Figure 2-1: Exalogic Elastic Cloud components.

In this example, Exalogic supports Fusion Middleware applica-

tions, Oracle Applications, and custom applications running ontop of the Exalogic Elastic Cloud Software and X2-2 hardware.Not all components in Figure 2-1 need to be present to runExalogic; you can opt not to use WebLogic Server, Coherence,or Tuxedo. A benefit of Exalogic is its flexibility to supportmany different types of applications.



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Chapter 2: Exalogic’s Optimized Architecture 11

Exalogic is built to support cloud computing; however, cloudcomputing is not a requirement in order to use Exalogic. If you

opt not to use the cloud computing architecture, you can stillbenefit from Exalogic in a traditional computing environment.Common use cases for Exalogic include the consolidation ofmany traditional servers into one or a few Exalogic machinesand the use of Exalogic as the foundation for shared servicesenvironments within the datacenter.

It is important to realize that the scope of Oracle softwareproducts is far beyond just Oracle Applications and Oracle

WebLogic servers. Oracle Fusion Middleware encompassesmany products including (but not limited to):

✓ Coherence Data Grid

✓ JRockit and HotSpot JVMs

✓ Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Suite and BusinessProcess Management (BPM) Suite

✓ WebCenter Collaboration and Content Management

✓ Forms and Reports Services, Business Intelligence, andIdentity Management

Oracle Exalogic is a highly engineered and optimized hard-ware and software solution using these components andcharacteristics:

✓ Intel-based hardware servers called compute nodes with

memory and CPU and solid state disks integrated andoptimized for application tier workloads

✓ Operating System (Oracle Solaris or Linux)

✓ High-performance InfiniBand network connecting all com-ponents within Exalogic and other Engineered Systemswith low latency

✓ Standard 10GbE-based client network and datacenterconnectivity

✓ Shared disk storage based on a built-in Sun ZFS StorageAppliance



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✓ Exalogic Elastic Cloud Software, which is a set of cross-stack software optimizations for optimized performance,

better throughput, simplified application provisioning,and more

✓ Extensive Management toolset

✓ Clustering and virtualization capabilities

✓ Optimized configuration and interoperability between allcomponents

Figure 2-2 shows how these components can fit togetherwithin Exalogic.

Fusion Middleware and Oracle Applications

WebLogic Server

JRockit and HotSpot JVMs

Coherence Tuxedo

OHS

Web Application Software

Exalogic Components

Exabus and Exalogic System Utilities

VirtualizationSolarisLinux

Exalogic Server Software

Disk StorageInfiniBand

NetworkingCPUMemory/Flash

Half Rack Full RackQuarter RackEighth Rack

Exalogic Server Hardware

Figure 2-2: Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud components.



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Chapter 2: Exalogic’s Optimized Architecture 13

In this example, you see how Exalogic is composed of hardwareand software components. When you get an Exalogic machine,

you will receive the prebuilt and tested hardware with eitherOracle Solaris or Linux OS installed and configured, as wellas the Exalogic Elastic Cloud Software. Applications can beinstalled on top of this infrastructure without any changes.

Of key importance is the engineered optimization and interop-erability between all these components. Because Oracle ownsall the components going into the Exalogic server, Oracle hasthe control and resources necessary to ensure an optimal

design and configuration.

Scalability for GrowthOracle Exalogic supports scaling to increase memory and CPUresources in the form of adding compute nodes, which areservers. A common technique is to add compute nodes untilthe server cannot be scaled any larger. Then, when no addi-tional servers are available within one rack, new racks can beadded and connected seamlessly to meet increased demand.

Oracle Exalogic machines come in Full, Half, Quarter, and EighthRack sizes. In a Full Rack configuration, the hardware has themaximum amount of memory and CPUs installed. A Half Rackconfiguration has one-half the memory and CPUs installed, andthe Quarter and Eighth Racks have one-fourth and one-eighththe memory and CPU installed, respectively.

Exadata and Exalogic machines are designed so that addi-tional hardware capacity can be added with little or no inter-ruption to current processing as expansion from Eighth toQuarter to Half to Full Rack occurs. Separate Exalogic (as wellas Exadata) racks can be joined together without the need foradditional networking equipment.

Exalogic X2-2Oracle Exalogic is currently offered in the form of the X2-2model. Each machine type can be loaded with Oracle Solaris11 Express or Oracle Linux 5. Full, Half, Quarter, and EighthRack sizes are available. Enterprise Manager Grid Control and



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Enterprise Manager OpsCenter provide the server manage-ment. Individual hardware components through the applica-

tion layer are managed via these tools and may be integratedwith Oracle Support Services. Solaris zones are supported toadd additional virtualization capabilities.

Hardware and operating system components are configuredat the factory before delivery to the customer. Additionally,Oracle provides optional Exalogic Start-Up Packs, AdvisoryServices, and installation, configuration, and quarterly patch-ing assistance.

The X2-2 is based on the Oracle Sun Fire X4170 M2 server.Processors are multicore X86 2.93 GHZ Xeon processors. Theunit of measurement is one compute node composed of two6 core processors with twelve 8 GB DIMMs (for 96 GB of RAM)and two 32 GB SATA high-performance MTBF solid state diskdrives in a RAID 1 configuration.

Shared storage is provided by the Oracle 7320 ZFS storage

appliance; each Exalogic machine has 40 TB. High-performancenetworking is provided via InfiniBand network and switches.The X2-2 comes in Eighth, Quarter, Half, and Full Rack configu-rations. Table 2-1 lists the total capacity for each configuration.For more information, check out www.oracle.com/exalogic.

Table 2-1 X2-2 Server Capacity

Resource EighthRack QuarterRack HalfRack FullRack 2-8 Racks

Xeon Cores 48 96 192 360 720-2880

Memory 384 GB 768 GB 1.5 TB 2.8 TB 5.6–22.4 TB

Flash FireSSD

128 GB 256 GB 512 FB 960 GB 1.9–7.7TB

Raw DiskStorage

40 TB 40 TB 40 TB 40 TB 80–320 TB

ComputeNodes(Servers)

4 8 16 30 60–240

Within the X2-2, all components are fully redundant, includingpower supply, network components, and storage. These fea-tures make for a very reliable and scalable machine.



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Chapter 3

Exalogic’s Capabilities In This Chapter ▶ Identifying performance-optimized components within Exalogic

▶ Highlighting features within Exalogic to improve processing capabilities

▶ Exploring administrative management tools and high availability

E xalogic represents the engineering of hardware andsoftware to produce a highly reliable and optimized

application tier platform. Advanced management tools, faulttolerance, and a focus on high availability make this machinehighly manageable for critical systems. This chapter takes alook at some of the individual features that make Exalogic runso fast and reliably.

Enhanced PerformanceMultiple components across the typical IT stack have beenoptimized by Oracle specifically for the Exalogic platform.This close engineering and integration between hardware andsoftware is possible because Oracle owns many of the tech-nologies “From Apps to Disk” and can address limitations inhow various layers of the stack interact.

One key item with Exalogic is that you do not have to makechanges to your applications to see performance benefits —

simply moving to Exalogic will improve performance of mostapplications. Enhancements within Exalogic are at the hard-ware, software, network, and integration levels; they touch allparts of an application. Any application running on Exalogiccan see performance improvements as long as it is supportedon the Exalogic platform. This allows a very rapid time tovalue for customers moving to Exalogic.



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Performance improvements within Exalogic manifest them-selves in two manners for customers:

✓ Processing times improve and the application runsfaster. This makes sense because as components runfaster, processes finish faster — which is what many cus-tomers expect.

✓ Efficiencies within applications are increased. BecauseExalogic is a faster platform, less raw processing poweris needed to support intense applications. This allows fora smaller, simpler implementation to support the sameapplication workload.

Many customers will experience both faster performanceand a more efficient system because of the move to Exalogic.Coupled with the fact that customers do not need to modifytheir applications to take advantage of Exalogic, the benefitsof a move to Exalogic are both tangible and immediate.

Key Component Optimizations Multiple components within Exalogic have been individuallyimproved as has the integration between components. Severalcomponents that specifically stand out are networking infra-structure, Java application server components, and the oper-ating systems.

Exabus InfiniBand backplaneThe one component with the greatest overall performanceimpact is the Exabus InfiniBand-based I/O fabric that links allthe components and subsystems within Exalogic together.It is what allows any supported application deployed toExalogic to run faster, regardless of what language that appli-cation is written in. It is also the basis for the reliability and

scalability of Exalogic.

Exabus is based on Quad Data Rate (QDR) InfiniBand and iscomposed of:



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Chapter 3: Exalogic’s Capabilities 17

✓ Switches

✓ Gateways

✓ Host Channel Adapters

✓ Firmware

✓ Device drivers

✓ Operating System extensions

✓ Software libraries

Exabus eliminates previous network performance boundariesthat have the greatest impact on overall system performance.By reducing the network wait time, applications run extremelyfast and fewer computing resources are required, thusimproving overall efficiency. Exabus benefits can be seen fromthe web server component to the storage tier. It is consideredpart of the “special sauce” that makes Exalogic run so fast andbe so efficient.

WebLogic Application Server In addition, WebLogic has been optimized for the Exalogic plat-form via improvements to the JVM (Java Virtual Machine) andOperating System. Improved parallel processing, intelligentsession replication, and enhanced network communication toother WebLogic and JVM instances are notable benefits.

Improvements with the WebLogic Self-Tuning Thread Pooland Increment Advisor, thread locking, and less threadcontention result in greater throughput. The number ofdata buffer copies within WebLogic has been reduced, thusimproving performance within the JSP compiler, ServletContainer, WebLogic Core, and the JVM.

You do not need to be running Java or WebLogic server togain performance benefits; non-J2EE applications can run

extremely well on Exalogic. For example, Oracle Forms appli-cations run very well on Exalogic with improved performancemerely by using the underlying enhanced hardware, software,and networking components. Oracle E-Business Suite is agreat example of such an application.



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Java optimizations: JRockit

and HotSpot JVMs Java applications execute with JVM during runtime. Theseare the runtime execution memory areas for Java programs.Obviously, the faster and more efficient a JVM executes, thefaster the application will run.

JRockit is the JVM highly tuned for WebLogic J2EE servers,and HotSpot is Sun Microsystems’s JVM. Both are optimized

for the Exalogic platform in terms of thread management lock-ing. A reduction in the number of data buffer copies insidethe JVM reduces heap usage, resulting in improved garbagecollection.

Operating systems Exalogic comes with either Oracle Solaris or Oracle Linux.

Although these operating systems (OS) are certainly installedon non-Exalogic machines, the installed software imageshave specific Exalogic software, firmware, and device driv-ers. Furthermore, any software installed on Exalogic such asOracle Fusion Middleware has specifically been tested andcertified for the underlying OS. Tuned networking parameters,such as enlarged Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU) size,allow for larger packets and faster communications, which isjust one example of Exalogic’s specific enhancements.

Improvements in ApplicationResponsiveness, Capacity, andDatabase Communication

Several optimizations have occurred within Exalogic to allowmore stable and improved communication between applicationservers and databases. These optimizations promote a morestable environment for users in which any internal failures aremasked and failover is transparent. Furthermore, enhancementsin communication to the database tier allow for improved appli-cation performance, capacity, and responsiveness.



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Chapter 3: Exalogic’s Capabilities 19

Session replicationAs a user works on a web-based application connected to aweb application server, that user’s session data is important. Ifa failure occurs, the session data can be lost and the user willneed to redo what he was doing before the failure. WebLogicactively replicates that session data to a secondary WebLogicserver so that if a failure occurs, the session is picked uptransparently on the second server. The benefit is, the userdoesn’t lose his work.

Within Exalogic, that replication speed and scale areimproved via the Exabus InfiniBand fabric using the SocketsDirect Protocol (SDP). A faster network speed with larger mes-sages allows for improved session replication and scalabilitybetween WebLogic Servers.

RAC integrationIntegration with Oracle RAC (Real Application Cluster) data-bases has been improved and simplified. Active GridLink forRAC improves performance between WebLogic and RAC data-bases by allowing the WebLogic server to interface directlywith Oracle RAC protocols. This provides for improved load-balancing and failover across RAC nodes. In the event of afailure with a RAC node, the failover to a surviving node isfaster and more transparent. Overall configuration of the datasources within WebLogic is also improved, thus making man-

agement simpler.

The database communication and RAC integration optimiza-tions take effect in particular when you utilize the Exadatadatabase machine as the database tier. Remember that manyof the same architectural optimizations within Exalogic arealso found in Exadata.

JDBC driver and OS/Networkcommunications Exalogic SQLNet communication to the Exadata databasemachine is optimized via the Exabus InfiniBand network.Using a native InfiniBand protocol, Sockets Direct Protocol



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performance between the application and database tiers isgreatly improved. This is especially important when large

amounts of data are being returned from the database serverto the application server.

Management Tools Oracle Enterprise Manager (EM) is the basis for most man-agement and monitoring activities within Exalogic. EM canmonitor and manage everything from hardware componentsto deploying a new release of a web application to a WebLogicserver or instances of E-Business Suite or PeopleSoft. Optionalintegration with Oracle Support allows for download andinstallation of patches in addition to software health checks.

EM Grid Control (EMGC) is the tool specifically used for man-agement of web application server software components andapplications. EM OpsCenter (EMOC) and Oracle IntegratedLights Out Manager (ILOM) are focused on managing physicalhardware, OS, and networking components.

High Availability andBackup and Recovery

Oracle Exalogic is designed so that via hardware redundancy,

clustering, and software configurations, no single points offailure exist and critical components have automatic failover.Furthermore, redundancy via additional computing serversallows maintenance, patching, and upgrades to occur with lessoverall risk and potential downtime and without impactingusers.

Finally, extensive monitoring and diagnostic capabilities ofOracle management tools and agents help prevent many

minor issues from becoming more severe problems that couldimpact system availability.



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Chapter 4

Ten (Okay, Five) Things toLook For in an Exalogic

Solution In This Chapter ▶ Identifying the benefits of an Exalogic cloud computing architecture

T his chapter covers Oracle Exalogic’s key benefits.

Getting Oracle Elastic CloudComputing’s Benefits

Moving to cloud computing architecture is an easy argumentto make when you emphasize the following points:

✓ Cloud computing provides unlimited capacity on demandas resource usage requirements increase.

✓ New environments are set up in days instead of weeks ormonths, allowing greater agility and faster time to market.

✓ Computing resources such as storage, processing power,

and network bandwidth are shared across the cloud,making the overall cost shared as well.

✓ Usage is closely monitored and customers pay for onlywhat they use. Customers do not pay for excess capacity.

✓ Oracle Exalogic is a major building block in the datacen-ter to achieve the benefits of cloud computing faster andat a lower cost.



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Making Use of Optimizations Because Oracle owns the hardware, operating system, stor-age, network, database, web, and application software, a veryhigh degree of engineering, integration, and testing occursbetween components. This is a key design principle across allof Oracle’s Engineered Systems. Exalogic provides already opti-mized components and configurations for the application tier.

Parallelizing Your Processing“Two heads are better than one,” and the same conceptapplies to Exalogic. Exalogic is fully redundant across alllayers and provides a balanced set of resources for businessapplications to run reliably and efficiently in either stand-alone or highly clustered deployments.

Accelerating Middleware and Application PerformanceGreat focus is placed on improving database performance forwhich Exadata can be a possible fit, but end-to-end applica-tion performance also requires a fast and scalable applicationtier solution. Exalogic’s optimized architecture ensures per-formance bottlenecks will not occur at the middleware and

applications tier.

Simplifying Operations Application and systems management, patching, and operationsare greatly simplified due to automation and preconfiguredcomponents. Integration with Oracle Support and rich adminis-trative tools reduce administration complexity and costs.

Visit oracle.com/Exalogic for more on Oracle’s engineeredsolutions for your datacenter.



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Exa Logic for Dummies

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