Oracle White Paper—Consolidating Oracle Applications on Exalogic

An Oracle White Paper

March, 2012

Consolidating Oracle Applications on Exalogic

Oracle White Paper—Consolidating Oracle Applications on Exalogic

Disclaimer

The following is intended to outline our general product direction. It is intended for information purposes

only, and may not be incorporated into any contract. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code,

or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release,

and timing of any features or functionality described for Oracle’s products remains at the sole discretion of

Oracle.

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Introduction Most companies have no interest to be in the IT infrastructure business. Enterprise applications serve important back office and front office functions to support a company’s core business, but managing the servers, operating systems, switches, cabling, storage devices, databases and middleware components underlying critical business applications merely creates a burden for most organizations. This realization is fueling the interest in cloud computing, software and platform as a service, and other trends in the technology industry. Many approaches to addressing IT complexity require changing the applications – moving to a different SaaS application provider, for example, in order to derive expected benefits of a simplified technology stack. In contrast, an engineered system allows companies to stop managing the details of IT infrastructure without changing the application, while also achieving optimal performance and having plenty of headroom to scale. Tightly integrated engineered systems offer a cost effective way of obtaining a purpose built system, which provides a standardized set of hardware, network, storage and software components, all pre-wired and tested, ready to run application workloads without change, and scale on demand. These engineered systems use best of class standardized components to provide maximum performance leveraging synergies between components and are open, reliable and scalable, allowing organizations to start small and grow with business needs. Engineered systems enable a shift that makes sense for the majority of companies - to focus IT investment on enabling their core business rather than on managing low level infrastructure details. Oracle Exalogic is a standard data center building block of integrated compute, storage and network components designed to provide an out of the box platform for a broad range of enterprise application workloads from Oracle Applications, Custom Applications and 3

rd party packaged applications.

This paper describes the specific benefits of running Oracle Applications such as E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, Siebel and JD Edwards on Exalogic.

Status of Application Deployments Today

Application IT managers tell us that key challenges for them are too many application instances running at too many data centers, on too many technology platforms that have been really difficult to assemble, manage and scale, and hence have poor utilization. Lets us examine each of these concerns in depth. Application instances have an ecosystem of supporting instances around them. Every production application instance typically has a dev, test and User Acceptance Test instance associated with it, in addition to an optional DR instance. OLTP and reporting instances are usually separate and it is not uncommon to separate batch tasks onto a separate instance to avoid interference with OLTP workloads. M&A activity often results in duplicate applications running on diverse hardware and OS platform in remote data centers. Entry into newer markets leads to new business requirements, which are often isolated into a separate instance. For example, it is not uncommon to have Order Management instances to support a specific geography or a specific line of business. Each instance is then customized to meet specific local or LOB requirements, increasing local dependency and reducing ease of consolidation. In summary, most enterprises end up with a large number of servers hosting a large number of application instances, with each server having low resource utilization. Applications are getting more complex. They require GBs of memory, TBs of hard disk space, faster and fatter network pipes and not to mention high speed processors. Assembling a platform that has all these characteristics is challenging. Organizations typically work closely with vendors, resellers and SIs to put

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together a combination of servers, software, memory, storage, and network resulting in a box that IT can then start to install applications on. Often the components chosen are not well matched, and a faster processor can be slowed down by a slower network. This whole process can take weeks/months before the first step of installing an application can begin. Vendors are addressing this problem by offering consulting, enabling resellers, creating bundles and reference configurations of components that work together, leaving IT staff to deal with multiple vendors and multiple domain experts to co-ordinate and manage. When it comes to managing an application deployment IT staff has to start at the hardware level and go all the way up the application stack. Given that most vendors only provide part of the stack, there are multiple tools required to manage different components, with no single consistent view. Tracking errors requires correlating between log files for each component, which are strewn across the network. Not to mention patches, which need to be applied separately at each of these components, with IT staff having the burden of making sure that one patch does not break the other component. Multiple tools, lack of consistent view and do-it-yourself maintenance result in reduced SLA that IT can provide to business. So what is the cure for application sprawl? A common solution is application consolidation – the notion of reducing your hardware and software footprint. Let us examine different forms of application consolidation.

Application Consolidation The cure for such widespread application sprawl is to get more apps to run on fewer servers in fewer, but larger data centers, commonly known as consolidation. Consolidation comes in many forms and consolidation projects are complex requiring changes to systems, data centers, people and applications. Let us look at a sampling of the common forms of consolidation, which by no means is complete and exhaustive.

Business growth often results in multiple data centers serving different geographies and lines of business. Given the ubiquitous nature of the network today, and the high data speeds available almost anywhere, companies are constantly looking to collapse the smaller data centers into physically larger data centers.. Such consolidation, known as Data Center consolidation, results in savings in space, maintenance costs, and people costs and reduce overall operational costs.

That leads us to the next type of consolidation – hardware consolidation, where applications running on different hardware servers are consolidated into fewer but larger servers. The goal is higher resource utilization, standardization on hardware and operating systems, physically fewer boxes to manage leading to savings in space and other data center metrics (cooling, power etc), better manageability and finally easier scalability. Newer hardware consolidates under-utilized storage and servers and provides easier scalability to take on new workloads and new business needs.

Another form of consolidation is application consolidation wherein, multiple instances of software are collapsed onto a single instance. This can be done in many ways depending on the architecture supported by the application. At a basic level this could involve sharing a common database across the applications. Progressing in complexity, next level of consolidation could involve running multiple logical instances on a single physical instance. Moving up, the organization could choose to run a single logical and physical instance enterprise wide. The next level is running the application as a shared service model and looking into cloud based approaches. Each of these approaches is progressively more involved than the previous method.

Exalogic supports all forms of consolidation. Based on standardized configuration it is a building block for data center consolidation, providing savings in space, power consumption and cooling. Exalogic scales horizontally and vertically providing support for hardware consolidation, leading to higher resource utilization. Finally since Exalogic supports open standards, it allows for software application consolidation

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by collapsing multiple software components on its high performance compute nodes, shared storage and InfiniBand network. More details in following sections.

Exalogic - Engineered System for Application Workloads Let us now get under the hood of Exalogic and understand its components. Exalogic consists of Exalogic Elastic Cloud Hardware and Exalogic Elastic Cloud Software, figure (1).

Figure (1) Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud Hardware and Software Engineered Together

Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud Hardware

Exalogic hardware is pre-assembled and delivered in standard data center rack configurations. Each Exalogic configuration contains a number of hot-swappable compute nodes, a clustered, high-performance disk storage subsystem, and a high-bandwidth interconnect fabric comprising the switches needed to connect every individual component within the configuration as well as to externally connect additional Exalogic or Exadata Database Machine racks. In addition, each configuration includes multiple 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports for integration with the datacenter service network and Gigabit Ethernet ports used for integration with the datacenter’s management network. All Exalogic configurations are fully redundant at every level and are designed with no single point of failure. Each Exalogic compute node is a fully self-contained unit with either multi-core x86 Xeon processors, redundant power supplies, fast ECC DIMM memory, and redundant InfiniBand Host Channel Adapters. Each compute node also contains two solid-state disks (SSDs), which host the operating system images used to boot the node and act as high-performance local swap space and storage for diagnostic data generated by the system during fault management procedures. InfiniBand is fundamental to the Exalogic Elastic Cloud system. In addition to providing an extremely fast, high-throughput interconnect between all of the hardware units within a deployment, it also provides extreme scale, application isolation, and elasticity.

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There are two traditional approaches to growing a datacenter’s workload handling capacity; the most basic approach is vertical scaling. Vertical scaling adds more processing power to an individual computer, but with major limitations. There are limits to how much a single computer can scale with a balanced configuration. Also, vertical scaling increases the impact of a single system failure. More recently, horizontal scaling has become more common and is accomplished by networking together many individual computers using basic networking technologies like Ethernet. Horizontal scaling increases both compute capacity and the tolerance of individual system failure. However, horizontally expanded systems function as a collection of separate computers that require coordination. This coordination is

challenged by throughput, latency and lack of high-end cluster features in basic Ethernet networks. By contrast, the lossless switched InfiniBand I/O fabric used by the Exalogic system connects all systems together in a way that forms a single large computer. As shown in figure (2), it is possible to start as small as an eighth rack, grow to medium or half a rack or to a large full rack and, even multiple racks if desired.

Figure (2) Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud Horizontal Scalability with InfiniBand

For more details, Exalogic Hardware overview whitepaper, can be found on Oracle.com/Exalogic

Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud Software

Java is a pervasive application implementation technology in use by enterprises today. Exalogic has been designed from the ground up to provide the ideal environment for enterprise Java applications and Java-based infrastructure. Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud Software includes a number of optimizations and enhancements made to

the core products within Oracle WebLogic Suite, the essential Java foundation on which Oracle’s next-generation applications are being developed. Oracle WebLogic Suite includes Oracle WebLogic Server, Oracle Coherence, Oracle JRockit, and Oracle HotSpot. Oracle Enterprise Manager provides application-to-disk management through Grid Control and OpsCenter. Enterprise Manager allows every individual hardware component within an Exalogic deployment to be monitored in real time and, at the customer’s option, have system status automatically

reported to Oracle Support for proactive system maintenance. Through integration with Oracle Support, Enterprise Manager can apply tested patch bundles tailored for Exalogic that cover every layer of the system, from device firmware, operating system and database to JVM, application server, upper-stack Fusion Middleware, and Oracle Applications.

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Exalogic Software overview whitepaper, can be found on Oracle.com/Exalogic

Deploying Oracle Applications on Exalogic and Exadata How does deployment on Exalogic benefit Oracle Applications? Each Oracle application is different and similar at the same time. Applications are dissimilar because each are built at different times of technology cycle by different groups of engineers and targeted at a different customer base. Hence technology choices made are not similar. For example some use Java more than others, some have standardized on WebLogic, while others are using Tuxedo or custom application servers. The similarities are in application architecture. Most applications are multi-tiered; with a web tier, application server tier and a database tier. Most applications separate out OLTP from reporting or OLAP. Also most applications scale at each of these tiers i.e. by adding additional web tiers for presentation, additional application server tiers for business logic scaling and additional database tiers as database volume and users grow. These multiple tiers in architecture have similar needs; they all need faster processors to crunch more logic, larger memory pools limit disk access and higher bandwidth networking to communicate between these tiers. Oracle Exalogic provides the optimum platform for all of these needs and figure (4), below shows

common deployment architecture for multi-tier applications. It is recommended that customers run the web tier, server tiers (known as mid tier or application server tier), and any batch processing tiers on Exalogic compute nodes, and the database tier on Exadata machines.

Figure (4), Common Deployment Architecture for Multi-Tier Applications

In addition to application workloads, Exalogic is ideal for combining application workloads with middleware workloads such as Integration, Business Intelligence, Identity Management and Portal. It is likely that these middleware components are working with Oracle applications hence co-locating those delivers higher performance due to single InfiniBand network fabric and easier manageability, figure (5).

Figure (5), Common Deployment Architecture for Multi-Tier Applications

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More detailed information on benefits of deploying Oracle applications on Exalogic in the individual application sections below.

Exalogic for Oracle JD Edwards Applications

Oracle's JD Edwards EnterpriseOne is an integrated applications suite of comprehensive enterprise resource planning software that combines business value, standards-based technology, and deep industry experience into a business solution with a low total cost of ownership. JD Edwards EnterpriseOne offers more than 70 application modules to support a diverse set of business operations for customers of any size, industry, and geography. The JD Edwards EnterpriseOne multi-tiered, scalable architecture lends itself extremely well to the Oracle Exalogic engineered design. In turn, the optimizations engineered into the Exalogic system provide direct benefit to every JD Edwards EnterpriseOne interactive and batch application. Specifically, JD Edwards EnterpriseOne inherits benefits from Exalogic in compatibility, performance, scalability and consolidation.

JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Architecture

The JD Edwards EnterpriseOne architecture comprises three general server tiers:

A Java Enterprise Edition tier, which provides presentation and integration services

A logic tier, which executes the runtime kernels and business logic

A database tier, which stores system data and business data

Oracle Exalogic Compatibility with JD Edwards EnterpriseOne

From a certification standpoint, the primary JD Edwards EnterpriseOne server components align well with the Oracle Exalogic architecture. All of the JD Edwards EnterpriseOne servers, shown in figure (6), are fully certified to run with Oracle Linux 5.5 and the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel. JD Edwards EnterpriseOne components that run within a Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) container are certified to

run with Oracle WebLogic Server. Laboratory testing using a standard benchmarking kit has demonstrated that JD Edwards EnterpriseOne applications performed well when running on Exalogic nodes. Recommended releases are JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Applications 9.0 Update 2 and Tools 8.98 Update 4.

Figure (6), JD Edwards EnterpriseOne servers

End User Web Client

DevelopmentClient

Clustered Web Servers

SOA Integration

Servers

Interactive Logic Server(s)

Batch Logic Server(s)

Database Server

Java EE Tier Logic Tier Database Tier

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For more information and support statements for running Oracle applications, including JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, on Exalogic, please see My Oracle Support document 1302529.1, “Oracle Applications on Exalogic.”

JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Certification on the Core Components of the Exalogic Architecture

JD EDWARDS ENTERPRISEONE COMPONENTS

ORACLE

LINUX X86-64

ORACLE

WEBLOGIC

SERVER

Enterprise Server: Provides the core runtime kernels, security, and business

logic execution NA

HTML Server: Provides a presentation layer to end-user (web browser) clients

and some Java logic execution

Business Services Server: Provides web-service-based integrations, both

inbound and outbound, to third party systems either directly or through services

provided by Oracle SOA Suite

Transaction Server: Provides outbound notification of certain JD Edwards

EnterpriseOne transaction events to a JMS queue

Portal: Built on Oracle WebCenter Framework or WebCenter Spaces, provides

the end-user with access to JD Edwards EnterpriseOne applications via portlets

JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Benefits from the Exalogic High-Performance Platform

More than the sum of its parts, Oracle Exalogic is engineered to provide a high-performance platform for the applications it hosts. In particular, optimizations within Oracle WebLogic Server and the JRockit virtual machine accelerate Java applications. At the network layer, InfiniBand networking streamlines communications among nodes within a single Exalogic rack, multiple racks, or to Exadata databases. The JD Edwards EnterpriseOne architecture is poised to inherit such performance optimizations. All end user transactions—literally every interactive query, data entry, and system response—is managed as a Java process running within a WebLogic Server container. Every end user transaction benefits from the Exalogic optimizations in WebLogic Server. Similarly, the JD Edwards EnterpriseOne distributed architecture, which is often implemented on multiple physical servers, benefits from the high-bandwidth, low latency provided by Exalogic’s InfiniBand network. Every JD Edwards EnterpriseOne transaction, both interactive and batch requires a stream of intercommunication among the logic server, the HTML server, and the database server. Exalogic’s InfiniBand networking eliminates bottlenecks and latency from this layer, streamlining every JD Edwards EnterpriseOne transaction. Performance testing of JD Edwards EnterpriseOne on Exalogic has demonstrated superb response time and scalability. A three-tier test configuration (enterprise, HTML, and database servers) utilizing a mere three Exalogic compute nodes produced astounding measurements:

900 concurrent interactive users, simulated with load-generation test tools

Average response time of 0.16 seconds for pure interactive load

Batch load of 34 jobs running concurrently with 900 interactive users, while maintaining sub second average response time

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Oracle Exalogic Provides a Scalable Architecture for JD Edwards EnterpriseOne

To achieve scalability, many customers take advantage of JD Edwards EnterpriseOne’s flexible architecture to spawn multiple enterprise (logic) servers. This common practice serves to scale the logic processing horizontally for both interactive and batch applications, thus improving performance and overall system throughput. Many JD Edwards EnterpriseOne customers have deployed this design pattern on a Linux / x86 platform in which relatively low-cost hardware is used to scale horizontally rather than forcing a major acquisition of “big iron” to scale vertically. The down-side to this approach is the

incremental power, cooling, floor space, and administrative costs associated with multiple servers. For JD Edwards EnterpriseOne customers Oracle Exalogic offers the best of both sides of the equation: incremental scale-out of the logic tier without the associated cost and sprawl of additional physical hardware, figure (7).

Figure (6), JD Edwards EnterpriseOne servers with Exalogic

The horizontal scaling design pattern is equally applicable, in fact better, for the JD Edwards EnterpriseOne HTML server, which runs within Oracle WebLogic Server. As interactive user load increases, multiple Java virtual machines can be spawned to accommodate the load. These JVMs can occupy one or more Exalogic compute nodes, thus providing an elastic scalability for JD Edwards EnterpriseOne implementations of any size.

Consolidate Your JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Servers on Oracle Exalogic

While one considers an Exalogic machine—whether a quarter rack, half rack, full rack, or multirack configuration—as a single entity, it might be easy to overlook the extreme density of computing power offered by each individual node. Offering 12 x86-64 CPU cores and 96 GB of memory, each Exalogic node is a capable server in and of itself. Previous scalability testing and published benchmarks on non-Exadata servers have shown that such Linux / x86-64 servers can support many hundreds of JD Edwards EnterpriseOne users. A reasonable extrapolation of such performance data suggests that even a modest quarter rack Exalogic configuration, offering 8 compute nodes, will accommodate a large proportion of JD Edwards EnterpriseOne use cases with capacity to spare. The likely utilization of that spare capacity includes:

Consolidating additional JD Edwards EnterpriseOne environments, which today may occupy many individual physical servers

Co-locating other Oracle products that interoperate with JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, such as Oracle WebCenter, Oracle Business Intelligence, Oracle SOA Suite. In particular, customers who are considering Oracle Fusion Applications to coexist with JD Edwards EnterpriseOne will benefit from the consolidated, scalable platform offered by Exalogic.

Co-locating any other applications with JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, relying on the physical isolation between Exalogic compute nodes to insulate applications from each other

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Conclusion

The JD Edwards EnterpriseOne architecture is poised to benefit from the optimizations engineered into the Oracle Exalogic design. Oracle has certified the major JD Edwards EnterpriseOne server components on the underlying components of Exalogic. Validation testing has shown that JD Edwards EnterpriseOne can be implemented on Exalogic with no modifications to the JD Edwards EnterpriseOne code. Performance testing has indicated excellent response times and scalability for both interactive and batch workloads. JD Edwards EnterpriseOne customers who are looking to capitalize on a highly scalable, well-performing platform are encouraged to consider Oracle Exalogic. For additional information about JD Edwards EnterpriseOne on Exalogic, please see:

Oracle Applications on Exalogic, My Oracle Support document 1302529.1

Exalogic Validation with JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, soon to be published in the JD Edwards EnterpriseOne White Paper Index, My Oracle Support document 870244.1

Exalogic for Oracle Siebel Applications Oracle Siebel is the world's most complete and market leading customer relationship management (CRM) solution managing all customer-facing operations with applications tailored to more than 20 industries. CRM applications are widely deployed for order management, tracking and managing services, and a host of other customer centric activities. The largest banks, financial institutions, telecommunications, pharmaceutical companies and government agencies use Oracle Siebel to ensure customers are better served by tracking every customer touch point. Siebel deployments have high availability and low latency requirements where downtime or slow response time can result in lost revenue. In addition, there is a need to support elastic growth in customer demand which often cannot be predicted. Siebel applications are typically used by front office users like call center agents to service customer interactions and these interactions result in business processes that span to back office applications. This results in a distributed architecture, with Siebel applications integrating with Finance, Billing and Supply Chain applications in the back office. These integrations often need to be in real time, for example a call center order booking applet in Siebel will make a lookup to back office inventory application to check if a product is available to promise. The need for high availability, low latency, elastic growth and, interaction with external applications lend Siebel deployments well to Oracle Exalogic. Let us examine the Siebel architecture to understand how Siebel components can be deployed on Exalogic and the resulting benefits. Compatibility Siebel applications versions that support Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL v 5.5) are supported and validated to run on Oracle Exalogic. As of now, Siebel applications 8.1.1.4 onwards are supported on Exalogic. For more details see Validation note 1302529.1 on myoracle.support.com. Architecture Siebel has a multi-tier architecture, with client, web server, Siebel Application Server, and Siebel Database Server tiers, see figure (8) below.

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The web server directs the requests to the Siebel Application Server. The Siebel Enterprise Server is the logical grouping of one or more Siebel Application Servers. The business logic resides in the Siebel

Application Server tier. Integration with Siebel through web services is achieved with Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) Component shown under Integration Services in the diagram above within Siebel Application Server. Siebel database includes Siebel tables, indexes, Siebel Repository and seed data. At the database tier Siebel supports the following databases - Oracle, DB2, DB2-390 and MS SQL Server RDBMS. In addition to the desktop web applications, Siebel also supports mobile and hand-held clients.

Figure (8), Siebel Multi-Tier Architecture

The Siebel multi-tiered architecture allows horizontal and vertical scalability for large-scale deployments by having number of load-balanced web and Siebel servers using Oracle RAC supporting tens of thousands of interactive users and millions of inbound and outbound transactions. So what are the benefits of deploying Siebel on Exalogic? The multi-tiered, scalable architecture of Siebel Applications maps very well to the engineered, purpose built design of Exalogic system, figure (9). Siebel

Server processes workloads that are both compute intensive (business logic execution) and I/O intensive. Exalogic’s high clock speed CPUs in combination with fast on board memory support the compute intensive tasks of the Siebel Application Server.

Figure (9), Siebel Application Mapping to Exalogic

The Siebel users and Integration Services transactions like web services traverse the Siebel components going from web server to Siebel Server to database. The underlying InfiniBand fabric with its 40GB transfer rate is ideal for communication between web server, Siebel Server and the backend database. In addition, when multiple Siebel servers are deployed for scaling, the InfiniBand fabric provides a fast pipe for inter server communication among Siebel Servers across Exalogic compute nodes]. Coupling Siebel mid tier on Exalogic with Siebel Database on Exadata provides additional performance gains.

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Consolidation Exalogic provides multiple configurations supporting growth in data center needs. It is likely that Exalogic configuration you choose will have spare compute capacity to co-locate other applications in your Siebel ecosystem such as E-Business Suite and middleware components such as Oracle Business Intelligence, SOA Suite, WebCenter and AIA. Fusion Middleware components are certified, supported and tuned for Exalogic. It is likely that FMW components are common to multiple applications in your environment. For example SOA Suite provides the integration bus and process layer to integrate Siebel and other applications. Similarly OBIEE (Business Intelligence) is used with Oracle Applications such as Siebel, EBS and 3

rd party apps. Deploying these common components co-located with Siebel and other

applications in the same Exalogic box, with its high performance InfiniBand network provides a high degree of performance. With Fusion Applications it is likely that customers will adopt some modules of Fusion applications while continuing to use Siebel. The co-existence between Siebel and Fusion Applications calls for integration between the two, which is delivered using Fusion Middleware. In summary, even though much of Siebel applications do not run on WebLogic and use little Java, they will draw significant benefits from the high performance Exalogic hardware, especially for horizontal scalability and co-location of other Oracle or 3

rd party applications having tightly or loosely-coupled

integration with Siebel.

Exalogic for Oracle E-Business Suite Applications Oracle E-Business Suite is a set of integrated business applications (Financials, Projects, Procurement, Supply Chain Management, Human Capital Management, and Customer and Master Data Management) with global support for currencies, languages, business practices, and local requirements and broad industry coverage.

The product is built on a flexible, scalable, open, standards-based business platform based on Oracle Fusion Middleware and the Oracle Database.

Exalogic Compatibility with Oracle E-Business Suite

Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 (12.0, 12.1) is certified on Exalogic running Oracle Linux 5 (Linux x86-64).

Customers on Release 12 can migrate their existing environments to Exalogic via the Rapid Clone methodology (My Oracle Support Note 406982.1), upgrade from a previous E-Business Suite 11i version on an older system to Exalogic or install a new Release 12 (12.1) instance using the Rapid Install wizard (see Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade Guide, Release 11i to 12.1.3 and Oracle E-Business Suite Installation Guide: Using Rapid Install).

Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 has been validated on the Exalogic and future releases of the product are expected to further gain from advances in technologies as well as continued testing and development on the system.

The E-Business Suite also is also certified with and optionally integrates with other standalone Oracle products such as Fusion Middleware 11g Portal, Discoverer, Oracle Internet Directory, Business Intelligence, Enterprise Manager and others, all of which provide additional features to complement traditional Applications functionality.

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Architecture The Oracle E-Business Suite environment is a 3-tier logical architecture comprising of database, application and client tiers commonly represented as shown in figure (10). The E-Business Suite Release 12’s application tier currently includes Oracle Fusion Middleware 10g

(Forms/Reports and Oracle Containers for Java (OC4J)) – E-Business Suite Applications products are installed on this same tier under separate directories (APPL_TOP, COMMON_TOP) along with all tools necessary for maintenance and updates. The essential components that run on the application tier are the Forms, Web and Concurrent Processing along with other service configurations such as Load Balancing, SSL enablement, etc. These components are typically spread over multiple machines for better utilization and isolation of separate components.

Figure (10), Oracle E-Business Suite Environment

The E-Business Suite user interface is composed both of Oracle Forms as well as HTML-only applications that are rendered to desktop and mobile devices. The HTML (or Self-Service) applications use the Oracle Application Framework (OA-FWK) which is a Java-based application tier framework along

with components such as Business Components for Java (BC4J) and a Java servlet engine to render user interface components to a web browser on the client tier. An engineered and optimized Exalogic system based on Fusion Middleware technologies provides a compelling platform for Oracle E-Business Suite that uses Java extensively as part of its core application tier functionality, figure (11).

Figure (11), Oracle E-Business Suite Environment on Exalogic

Existing network topologies for E-Business Suite provide an average latency of up to 300ms provides acceptable performance (see Oracle E-Business Suite Concepts) – engineered systems such as the Exalogic and its use with Exadata (for the database tier) can be expected to significantly improve performance due to the use of InfiniBand networking technologies.

The use of an Exadata system to host an Oracle E-Business Suite database tier running Oracle Database 11g Release 2 in addition to the use of Exalogic on the application tier together represents a highly optimized and performant overall system that is well suited for the globalized and flexible needs of modern enterprises.

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Consolidation

The E-Business Suite and associated optional technology products are typically installed in a ‘multi-node’ fashion where the database and application tiers are separated into separate nodes or servers.

The use of multiple application tiers where the separate components of the core E-Business Suite technology stack such as Forms, Web Server, and Concurrent Processing nodes are installed separately is also a fairly common architecture amongst our customers. Further scalability and reliability can also be achieved by the addition of application tiers in more advanced networking topologies that are supported with the E-Business Suite.

The Exalogic system provides an effective means of consolidating these multiple application tiers along with the optional use of optional Fusion Middleware 11g technology components in separate compute nodes with capacity for further expansion and co-existence with other Applications.

Exalogic for Oracle PeopleSoft Applications For years, PeopleSoft has relied on several market leading, core technology products that have provided a well performing, scalable solution with high reliability. Today, the core technologies used by PeopleSoft are evolving with Exalogic, and taking performance and scalability to new levels, all while also improving reliability. PeopleSoft customers will find Exalogic to be a great option if they want to simplify their infrastructure by consolidating web or application server farms, improve response times and take advantage of the reliability provided by the native components of Exalogic. PeopleSoft Compatibility with Exalogic PeopleSoft 9.0 and 9.1 applications are already certified to run on Exalogic with PeopleTools 8.50 and 8.51; both PeopleTools releases are already certified with x86-64 based Oracle Linux 5.5 and the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel. For more information and support statements for running Oracle applications, including PeopleSoft on Exalogic, please see My Oracle Support, Doc ID 1302529.1.

PeopleSoft Architecture

PeopleSoft’s existing architecture includes WebLogic Server, JRockit and Tuxedo – all of which are all being optimized and enhanced to exploit the features of Exalogic. PeopleSoft’s three-tier architecture includes the database server, application server (which includes the batch server/process scheduler) and client was introduced with PeopleTools 7 in the late 1990’s. The application server, with Tuxedo at the core, was typically run on hardware separate from the database server, although it was to be positioned ‘close’ to the database server from a networking perspective to avoid latency issues. The batch server could be run either on the same machine as the application server, or separate, depending on load. Tuxedo was key to enabling the scalability and reliability of the PeopleSoft application server that was demanded by the marketplace. Later, PeopleSoft introduced the PeopleSoft Internet Architecture (PIA) which added a fourth tier, the web server, as shown in figure (12), to the PeopleSoft architecture to primarily act as the Java servlet container. Like the application server, it was recommended that the web server tier be run on separate physical hardware to avoid competing with the application server for system resources. WebLogic Sever quickly became PeopleSoft customers’ web server of choice, being known for ease of use, scalability and reliability.

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Today, scalability with PeopleSoft is often achieved through horizontal scaling. Recently, a significant trend has developed with more and more customers turning to Linux to scale their PeopleSoft

environments for both the application and web servers. As a customer’s PeopleSoft user base grows, new Linux-based application servers are brought on line, along with new web server instances being added as needed. The use of commodity rack-based hardware avoids big bang costs associated with a single high end machine, but it does bring in more potential issues around latency and manageability. Exalogic helps in both of these areas.

Figure (12), PeopleSoft Internet Architecture

WebLogic Server & JRockit WebLogic on Exalogic provides PeopleSoft applications a number of benefits in performance, scalability and throughput. Let us examine several of the recent Exalogic enhancements for technologies found in the PeopleSoft architecture, and the benefits customers will see using Exalogic. First, WebLogic’s internal thread handling infrastructure was enhanced to support a higher degree of parallel processing. In addition, each thread will also take advantage of a higher internal communication speed between the multiple levels of WebLogic. This higher bandwidth (40 Gb/second) is enabled by Exalogic’s InfiniBand I/O fabric, which provides higher through-put and has extremely low latency. To maximize the benefits of the stream lined threads along with the faster communication speed, WebLogic also uses fewer messages that are larger than before. This streamlines communications, avoids costly read/write operations and prevents useless swapping of information also known as context switching. By improving the thread infrastructure, WebLogic now keeps track of threads with 3 internal lists. This greatly reduces the chance of any thread contention. The end result of WebLogic’s threading related enhancements made for Exalogic is that PeopleSoft customers can expect faster performance, more through put, with less chance of contention. Second, WebLogic has changed the way it passes information internally, as well as between the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and operating system. This resulted in a reduction in the number of copies of information being made, and more importantly, a significant savings in system resources. Previously, when information was passed between WebLogic’s internal components - the JSP compiler, servlet container and WebLogic core, copying data was required at each level. Then, more copies were made when calls were made to the JVM and operating system. This added a lot of CPU cycles for the extra object creations and deletions, and space on the Java heap in memory to perform these operations. PeopleSoft applications typically use large messages, so the benefit of a reduction in information copying will be a substantial savings of CPU and memory that would have been otherwise spent on the object creation and deletion. An added benefit customers will also enjoy is less frequent garbage collection by the JVM, and the resulting CPU savings. Third, WebLogic and the JVM have been enhanced so that WebLogic calls made from an Exalogic system are more efficient. A new type of I/O allows the grouping of chunks of information, and enables

Consolidating Oracle Applications with Exalogic Page 17

the sending of this single collection of chunks instead of all of the smaller chunks individually. More efficient network calls, along with better performance will be the result for PeopleSoft customers. Fourth, automatic thread tuning in Web Logic has been enhanced for Exalogic. The self-tuning thread pool in WebLogic has been enhanced to recognize the Exalogic hardware and more quickly and effectively manage thread usage. Instead of using single increments, threads are now adjusted by 24 at a time, the best possible number for Exalogic hardware. The advantage for PeopleSoft customers here is that Web Logic will now more quickly react and reach the optimized configuration, as well as adapt to any further required changes – automatically. This allows for better scalability and performance.

Tuxedo Today, Tuxedo on Exalogic takes its performance, scalability and reliability to the next level. With Exalogic’s InfiniBand I/O fabric, Tuxedo’s network latency is reduced by up to 10x. Latency of mere tens of microseconds is now achievable. For an application like PeopleSoft that has been described as ‘chatty,’ this massive reduction in latency will provide a significant performance improvement. PeopleSoft has long enjoyed Tuxedo’s near-linear scalability. With Exalogic, Tuxedo combines its linear scalability with Exalogic’s dynamic scaling from 12 cores to up to 2880 cores with no degradation of system performance. The extreme scalability now available with Tuxedo on Exalogic will enable customers to easily react and accommodate any fluctuations in load.

When Exalogic is brought into the PeopleSoft environment for the application server and web server tiers, there is some flexibility in how it could be configured. As mentioned previously, the application server and batch servers could be placed on the same node. However, if a heavy batch load is anticipated, there are advantages to putting the batch server on its own node. Assuming that case, here’s one recommended configuration in figure (13).

Figure (13), PeopleSoft on Exalogic

Conclusion

PeopleSoft’s use of proven, market leading technology bodes well for customers looking to improve their application performance, scalability and through put with Exalogic. The Exalogic platform enhancements stand ready to provide all PeopleSoft customers dramatic improvements at every tier within PeopleSoft… today. The benefits come with no changes required in the PeopleSoft applications. As further optimizations are made within the PeopleSoft stack in strategic areas such as WebLogic, JRockit and Tuxedo, the PeopleSoft experience will only get even better. And when Exalogic is combined with Exadata as a database server, be prepared for the extreme performance experience!

Consolidating Oracle Applications with Exalogic Page 18

Oracle Applications Validation Summary As mentioned in earlier sections of this white paper, support document 1302529.1, will have the latest list of Oracle Applications validated on Exalogic. Here is a snapshot of the document at the time of publishing this white paper. Please refer to support link and contact your Oracle representative to get latest version.

Product Versions Validated on Supported on OEL5.5

E-Business Suite 12.0.6 and 12.1.3

Siebel 8.1.1.4

PeopleSoft Applications: 8.9, 9.0, 9.1, PeopleTools: 8.50, 8.51, 8.52

JD Edwards Applications: 8.11, 8.11 SP1, 8.12, 9.0, 9.1 Tools: 8.98.4

Conclusion Even though each Oracle Application has its own unique architecture, they all are built with a common multi-tier approach. Exalogic is designed to help consolidate application workloads, enhance performance and ease manageability of multi-tier applications. Applications that use Java, WebLogic and Tuxedo stand to gain the most in terms of performance improvements due to optimizations in Exalogic Elastic Cloud Software. Applications that make limited or no use of Java will see impressive performance benefits due to high performance Exalogic compute nodes, InfiniBand network and faster and larger memory pool. Pre-built and factory delivered Exalogic will save weeks from Application IT projects. Coupled with Exadata for hosting application databases, applications will see unmatched performance and scalability. Exalogic provides multiple configurations to allow for growth and consolidation of Oracle applications. These performance benefits coupled with the consolidation benefits of lower data center costs; simplified horizontal scaling and easier manageability make Exalogic the ideal choice of hardware to run Oracle Applications.

Consolidating Oracle Applications with Exalogic Page 19

Resources For more details review the following resources:

Exalogic & Exadata o Exalogic Brief Introduction White Paper o Exalogic Software Overview o Exalogic Hardware Overview o http://www.oracle.com/exalogic o http://www.oracle.com/exadata o twitter.com/OracleExalogic o Facebook.com/Exalogic

E-Business Suite o Oracle E-Business Suite on Oracle Exadata Database Machine White Paper o Oracle E-Business Suite Online Documentation Library o MAA Best Practices – Oracle Applications

PeopleSoft o Oracle PeopleSoft on Oracle Exadata Database Machine White Paper o PeopleTools Performance Guidelines White Paper

Siebel o Oracle Siebel on Oracle Exadata Database Machine White Paper

JD Edwards o Exalogic Validation with JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, soon to be published in the JD

Edwards EnterpriseOne White Paper Index, My Oracle Support document 870244.1

Consolidating Oracle Applications with Exalogic Page 20

Consolidating Oracle Applications on Exalogic March 2012

Authors: John Abraham, Mehdi Garami, Mark

Hoernemann, Nishit Rao, AJ Schifano

Contributing Authors: Miranda Nash, Michael

Palmeter, Yogesh Rami

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