Infrastructure at your Service
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…
Introduction Cloud, Cloud, Cloud. Everyone is talking about the Cloud but a lot of people are still in the fog with Cloud technologies. Let’s talk about basic features of the Oracle Cloud, called OCI for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. What is really OCI? OCI is physically a lot of servers in datacenters all around the world. These servers are not very different from the servers you probably have in your own datacenter. Some of these servers…
Recently I had to add some storage on an ODA X8-2M that I deployed early February. At that time the last available release was ODA 18.7. In this post I would like to share my experience and the challenge I could face.
Introduction With the latest ODA X8 range, at least 80% of the customers could find an ODA configuration that fits their needs. For the others, either they can’t afford it, either they are already in the Cloud, or they need extremely large storage or EXADATA performance. Among these 80% of customers, only a few choose ODA. Let’s see how Oracle could improve the ODA to make it a must. 1) Make robust and reliable releases…
During a past project, we were using ODA X8-2M with one additional network card. As per my knowledge, on an appliance, additional cards are used to extend connectivity to additional network. Customer was really enforcing to have network redundancy between the 2 cards. I then took opportunity for some tests. In this post, I would like to share my experience on these tests and how to properly configure network card extension on an ODA.
