Infrastructure at your Service
Introduction ODA started to become popular with X3-2 and X4-2 in 2013/2014. These 2 ODAs were very similar. The X5-2 from 2015 was different with 3.5 inches disks instead of 2.5 inches and additional SSDs for small databases (FLASH diskgroup). All these 3 ODAs were running 11gR2 and 12cR1 databases and were managed by the oakcli binary. If you’re still using these old machines, you should know that there is a lot of differences compared…
Introduction One of the advantage of Oracle Database Appliance is its fast deployment. Most often, the initial setup of a lite ODA (with a reimaging) only takes half a day, from unboxing until a first test database is available. Trust me, it’s hard to do better. For some reason, for example if you need to patch to the latest release and you have some intermediate patch to apply before, or if you plan to change…
Introduction You can say everything about Oracle infrastructure possibilities but nothing compares to experience based on the realization of real projects. I did quite a lot of ODA projects during the past years (on other platforms too), and I would like to tell you why I trust this solution. And for that, I will tell you the story of one of my latest ODA project. Before choosing ODAs A serious audit of the current infrastructure…
Introduction 6 months after the 19.6, the first 19c production release, here comes the 19.9 Oracle Database Appliance patch with major improvements. Will my ODA supports this 19.9 patch? First, the 19.9 release will be the same for all ODAs, as usual. Like 19.6, the oldest ODA compatible with this release will be the X5-2. Don’t expect to install 19c on older models. X4-2 is stuck to 18.8, X3-2 is stuck to 18.5 and V1…
Introduction Oracle Database Appliances rely on ASM to manage disk redundancy. And ASM is brilliant. Compared to RAID, redundancy is managed at the block level. For NORMAL redundancy, which is similar to RAID1, you need at least 2 disks, but it can also work with 3 disks, 4 disks, 5 disks and so on. There is no need for parity at the disk level. HIGH redundancy, which does not exist in RAID technology, is basically…
Introduction Oracle Database Appliances are very popular these days. And not only among new customers for this kind of engineered systems. Almost all customers already using old generation ODAs are renewing their infrastructure by choosing again ODAs, meaning that the solution is good enough and probably better than anything else. But now, public clouds are a real alternative to on-premise servers, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is a solid competitor vs Amazon and Azure public clouds….
Introduction There is no need to decrease the number of cores on your ODA when using Standard Edition 2, because your license is based on the number of physical CPU. So why would you do that? Obviously, the more cores you have, the more performance you should get. But that simply isn’t always true. Base CPU speed and Turbo Boost If you didn’t read my previous blog, please do so to understand how Xeon processors…
Introduction A complaint I heard from customers about ODA is the low core speed of the Intel Xeon processor embedded in the X8-2 servers: Intel(R) Xeon(R) Gold 5218 CPU @ 2.30GHz. 2.30GHz only? Because of its comfortable number of cores (16 per processor), the cruise speed of each core is limited. Is it a problem compared to a home made server with less cores? Why clock speed is important? As you may now, the faster…
Introduction I’ve been dreaming of this kind of feature: just because most of the ODA configurations now include Disaster Recovery capabilities, through Data Guard or Dbvisit standy. If Dbvisit will obviously never be integrated to odacli, the lack of Data Guard features is now solved by the very latest 19.8 ODA software appliance kit. How Data Guard was implemented before 19.8? Those who have been using ODA and Data Guard for a while know that…
