Oracle E-Business Suite and RAC Performance and Elasticity on

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1 © 2011 VCE Company, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

ORACLE E-BUSINESS SUITE AND RAC PERFORMANCE AND ELASTICITY ON VBLOCK PLATFORMS WITH VSPHERE 4.1

December 2011

© 2011 VCE Company, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

www.vce.com


Contents

Executive Summary ................................................................................................................. 4 Business Case ........................................................................................................................ 4 Solution .................................................................................................................................. 4 Objectives ............................................................................................................................... 4 Key Results ............................................................................................................................ 5 Benefits .................................................................................................................................. 5 Audience................................................................................................................................. 5 Feedback ................................................................................................................................ 5

Technology Overview .............................................................................................................. 6 VCE Vblock™ Infrastructure Platforms ................................................................................... 6 Oracle 11g R2 Enterprise Edition ............................................................................................ 6 Oracle Real Application Clusters 11g R2 ................................................................................ 7 Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 ...................................................................................... 7 EMC Unified Infrastructure Manager ....................................................................................... 7

Architecture Overview ............................................................................................................. 8 High-Level Architecture ........................................................................................................... 8 Physical Topology ................................................................................................................... 9 Performance Test Environment .............................................................................................10 Scalability Test Environment ..................................................................................................11 Hardware Components ..........................................................................................................12 Software Components ...........................................................................................................12 Storage Layout ......................................................................................................................12

Performance Testing ..............................................................................................................15 Test Objective ........................................................................................................................15 Test Environment ...................................................................................................................15 Test Procedures ....................................................................................................................15 Test Results and Analysis ......................................................................................................15

Scalability Testing ..................................................................................................................17 Test Objective .................................................................................................................................................................... 17


Test Environment ...................................................................................................................17 Test Procedures ....................................................................................................................17

Scaling Oracle RAC ............................................................................................................17 Scaling the Application Tier ................................................................................................18

Test Results and Analysis ......................................................................................................18

Conclusion ..............................................................................................................................20 Next Steps .............................................................................................................................20 References ............................................................................................................................20

Appendix A ..............................................................................................................................21 Preparing the Test Environment ............................................................................................21 Test Tools ..............................................................................................................................21 Workload Description .............................................................................................................22


Executive Summary

Organizations today are challenged by dynamic workloads driven by rapid business cycles and continuous changes in the landscape due to rollouts, release changes, and process automation. As a result, performance and elasticity are key success factors in achieving the operational efficiency and agility required in their business applications.

This white paper describes how Vblock™ Infrastructure Platforms address these issues for Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS). To validate the solution, a typical Oracle customer environment was built on a Vblock platform. The environment consisted of a Vblock Series 700 with VMware vSphere 4.1, Oracle EBS applications, and an Oracle clustered database. Baseline physical and virtual performance under load, and performance under load while scaling was measured. Test results are presented in this paper.

Business Case

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions such as EBS have been historically slow to migrate to a converged infrastructure and virtualization. Performance and elasticity are two of the key barriers. Customers want assurance that virtualizing their Oracle production systems and business applications will provide:

Performance that meets the needs of business service level agreements (SLA)

Flexibility to address application needs while efficiently scaling out in response to continuously changing resource requirements

Lower total cost of ownership (TCO) while maintaining a high return on investment (ROI)

Solution

The Vblock platform offers compute, network, storage, virtualization, and management technologies from industry-leading vendors to ensure the highest levels of availability, data protection, and security. IT organizations can migrate their Oracle EBS and RAC deployments from a physical environment to a virtual environment without disruption. As a result, Oracle EBS and RAC instances can be consolidated on less hardware to improve utilization and reduce licensing costs. The Vblock platform allows IT organizations to effectively manage and allocate resources to meet the demands of a dynamic Oracle EBS environment.

Objectives

The objectives of the testing were to demonstrate that:

Performance of Oracle EBS and RAC running I/O intensive application-based workloads on vSphere 4.1 on the Vblock platform meets the needs of typical business SLAs

The virtual environment provided by vSphere 4.1 on the Vblock platform allows scaling out and scaling up of Oracle EBS and RAC deployments to accommodate dynamic workloads


Key Results

VCE conducted extensive performance testing of Oracle EBS applications in a virtual Oracle RAC environment on the Vblock platform. Key results were:

Application response time for transactions in the physical and virtual environments was within a 5-10% range.

Scaling out and scaling up Oracle EBS and RAC on the Vblock platform improves performance.

Benefits

Virtualizing Oracle EBS and Oracle RAC on the Vblock platform provides the following benefits:

IT Cost Containment

Maximize licensing return on investment (ROI) by deploying more Oracle instances on less hardware

Increase utilization and reduced cost through server consolidation

Simplified Performance Management

Accelerate deployment and simplify operation with standardized, prepackaged units of converged infrastructure on the Vblock platform

Accommodate growth, dynamic workloads, and scheduled maintenance with dynamic virtual machine migration and vertical and horizontal scaling

Non-disruptive Innovation

Ensure the highest levels of availability, data protection, and security by leveraging industry-leading preconfigured converged infrastructure platform

Accelerate migration from a physical to a virtual environment and deployment of Oracle instances with VMware virtual machine templates, Oracle Rapid Cloning technologies, and EMC replication software

Audience

Any individuals tasked with evaluating, acquiring, managing, operating, or deploying Oracle EBS in a virtualized data center environment will benefit from reading this paper.

Feedback

To suggest documentation changes and provide feedback on this paper, send e-mail to [email protected]. Include the name of this paper, the page your comment applies to, and your feedback.

mailto:[email protected]


Technology Overview

This solution uses the following major hardware and software:

VCE Vblock Infrastructure Platform

Oracle Database 11g R2 Enterprise Edition

Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) 11g R2

Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12

VCE Vblock™ Infrastructure Platforms

Vblock platforms combine industry-leading compute, network, storage, virtualization, and management technologies into prepackaged units of infrastructure. Through standardization of building blocks, the Vblock platform dramatically simplifies IT operations—accelerating deployment while reducing costs and improving service levels for all workloads, including the most demanding and mission critical enterprise applications.

Vblock platforms scale to deliver the right performance and capacity to match the needs of business applications. The following Vblock platforms are available:

Vblock Series 300 is designed to address a wide spectrum of virtual machines, users, and applications. Ideally suited to achieve the scale required in both private and public cloud environments. Vblock 300 scales from smaller- to mid-sized enterprise Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Supply Chain Management (SCM), e-mail, file & print, and collaboration deployments.

Vblock Series 700 is designed for deployments involving very large numbers of virtual machines and users and is ideally suited to meet the higher performance and availability requirements of critical business applications. Vblock 700 scales to the largest deployments of enterprise CRM and SCM, datacenter operation environments, and service provider cloud computing offerings.

Refer to the Vblock Infrastructure Platforms Technical Overview for detailed information on the Vblock platform.

Oracle 11g R2 Enterprise Edition

In Oracle 11g R2 Enterprise Edition, both Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM) and Oracle Clusterware have been integrated into a single set of binaries and named Oracle Grid Infrastructure. This now provides all cluster and storage services required to run an Oracle RAC database.

http://www.vce.com/vblock/


Oracle Real Application Clusters 11g R2

Oracle RAC combines storage and processing power across a cluster of machines for high availability. Oracle RAC extends the Oracle Database so that you can store, update, and efficiently retrieve data from multiple instances on different servers at the same time. Oracle RAC provides the software that allows the servers to work together as a cluster. The physical structures that make up the database must reside on shared storage that is accessible from all servers in the cluster. Each server in the cluster runs the Oracle RAC software.

In Oracle RAC environments, multiple cluster database instances form a single database. The instances can be on different servers and can be referred to as hosts or nodes. The combined processing power of the multiple servers provides greater throughput and scalability than is available from a single server.

Note: For Oracle's support policy on Oracle products running on VMware, refer to My Oracle Support Doc [ID 249212.1].

Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12

The Oracle EBS architecture is a framework for multitiered distributed computing. In the Oracle EBS model, services are distributed among multiple levels or tiers. A service is a process or a group of processes that exercise some business logic and provide a particular functionality. A tier is a grouping of services that can potentially span physical machines. In other words, a tier is a logical grouping of services that is not limited by physical nodes or machines. Each tier can consist of one or more nodes, and each node can accommodate more than one tier. For example, a single machine can contain database, application, and desktop tiers; in the same way, a database can reside on one of many application servers or on a separate machine by itself.

Note: For more details, refer to Oracle Applications Concepts [B10642-01].

EMC Unified Infrastructure Manager

EMC Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager/Provisioning (UIM/P) provides simplified management for Vblock platforms, including provisioning, configuration, change, and compliance management. With a consolidated dashboard view, policy-based management, automated deployment, and deep visibility across the environment, UIM/P is integral to managing Vblock platforms efficiently.

UIM/P provides the functionality to package portions of the compute, storage, and network resources of a Vblock infrastructure into infrastructure services. Once in a service, the resources can be reserved, deployed, allocated, and managed as a single entity through UIM/P.


Architecture Overview

The performance and scalability testing described in this white paper was conducted on a virtualized Oracle environment created on the Vblock platform using VMware vSphere virtualization software. Intended to replicate a common customer environment, the virtual environment included Oracle EBS applications and a virtualized Oracle clustered database (Oracle and Oracle RAC).

High-Level Architecture

Figure 1 shows the high-level architecture of the test environment.

Figure 1. High-level Architecture


Physical Topology

Figure 2 shows the physical topology of the test environment.

Figure 2. Physical Topology


Performance Test Environment

Figure 3 illustrates the performance test environment.

Figure 3. Performance Test Environment


Scalability Test Environment

Figure 4 illustrates the scalability test environment.

Figure 4. Scalability Test Environment


Hardware Components

A virtual Oracle RAC can be deployed on any Vblock platform that provides SAN connectivity. The performance testing described in this paper was performed on the Vblock Series 700 model MX. The following table lists the hardware components used in testing.

Component Quantity Configuration

Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS)

1 2 x 6120 Fabric Interconnects 8 x Cisco B-Series blades (12 x CPU cores and 192 GB

memory on each blade) - 3 x used for physical environment tests - 3 x used for virtualized environment tests - 2 x additional used for scale out tests

Storage 1 EMC VMAX storage

Network 2 Cisco MDS 9513 Switch

Software Components

The following table lists the software components used in testing. Also, refer to “Test Tools” in Appendix A.

Platform Role Version

Red Hat Linux 5 Operating system RHEL 5 U4 (64-bit)

Oracle 12.1 E-Business Suite Application 12.1.1

Oracle 11g R2 Enterprise Edition

Database 11.2.0.2

Oracle 11g R2 Real Application Clusters (RAC)

Clusterware 11.2.0.2

VMware vSphere 4 Virtualization 4.1

Storage Layout

For performance testing, two VMAX thin storage pools comprising Fibre Channel (FC) disks were used. These disks were 15K 600 GB RPM.


Pool 1 (eBizR10) contained twenty 50 GB RAID 1 data devices with 1TB of usable storage. The following table lists the thin LUNs (TDEVs) created from this pool.

Environment LUNs Virtual Disks

Physical Oracle DB online redo logs 3 x 100 GB

Virtual (provisioned as RDMs)

Oracle DB online redo logs 3 x 100 GB

Pool 2 (eBizR5) contained 2000 50-GB RAID 5 data devices with 10 TB of usable storage. The following table lists the thin LUNs (TDEVs) created from this pool.

Tier Environment LUNs Virtual Disks

Oracle DB Physical Oracle RAC voting/OCR disks Oracle Archive Log DG Oracle Data DG Oracle Temp space DG

6 x 4 GB 1 x 536GB 3 x 365 GB 1 x 256 GB

Virtual (provisioned as RDMs)

Oracle RAC voting/OCR disks Oracle Archive Log DG Oracle Data DG Oracle Temp space DG RAC

6 x 4 GB disks Oracle RAC voting/OCR disks

Oracle Application

Physical OS Application tier binary and shared application tier files

1 x 100 GB 1 x 500 GB

Virtual (provisioned as VMDKs)

OS Application tier binary and shared application tier files

1 x 100 GB 1 x 500 GB

Note: DG = Automatic Storage Management Disk Group

Figure 5 shows storage mappings for the Oracle database.


Figure 5. Storage Layout


Performance Testing

To characterize performance of Oracle EBS and Oracle RAC on the Vblock platform, performance testing was conducted for Oracle EBS applications and Oracle RAC operating in each of the following environments:

Physical environment

Virtual environment with VMware vSphere 4.1

Test Objective

The objective of performance testing was to demonstrate that performance of Oracle EBS and RAC running I/O intensive application-based workloads on vSphere 4.1 on the Vblock platform meets the needs of typical business SLAs.

Test Environment

Figure 3 illustrates the performance test environment. Refer to “Preparing the Test Environment” in Appendix A for the procedure used to set up the test environment.

Test Procedures

Performance testing consisted of execution of Order Management Transactions. Refer to “Workload Description” in Appendix A for a description. To test performance with increased load, the number of concurrent users was incremented from 100 to 500.

Test Results and Analysis

Five load tests were performed in each environment. Results were averaged to find the average application response time (in seconds) for each transaction in the load test. Figure 6 compares average application response times in the physical Oracle RAC environment to average application response times in the virtual Oracle RAC environment.


Figure 6. Average Application Response Times

The major findings are:

1. As shown in Figure 6 above, a slight increase in the average application response time was observed in the virtual test environment when compared to the physical test environment.

2. A comparison of the average 90th percentile response time for each transaction showed that Oracle EBS in the virtual environment on the Vblock platform performed at 87% of Oracle EBS in the physical environment. The minimal degradation is due to ESX overhead.


Scalability Testing

To demonstrate the scalability and elasticity benefits of the virtualized Oracle environment, load testing with 500 active concurrent users was conducted and performance was measured after adding one Oracle EBS application node and one Oracle RAC database node to the virtual Oracle environment.

Test Objective

The objective of scalability testing was to demonstrate that the virtual environment provided by vSphere 4.1 on the Vblock platform allows scaling out Oracle EBS and RAC deployments to meet dynamic workloads.

Test Environment

Oracle E-Business Suite 12 provides the option for a multi-node configuration to share the application file system. Because a shared application file system is recommended for load balancing configurations with Oracle EBS R12, a shared application file system was implemented for both physical and virtualized Oracle EBS environments. An NFS server was used to mount the shared application file system for Oracle EBS.

Figure 4 illustrates the scalability test environment.

Note: My Oracle Support Doc ID 384248.1 (Sharing the Application Tier File System in Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12) provides details on how to migrate from a non-shared application tier with Oracle EBS R12 to the recommended configuration for a shared application file system.

Test Procedures

Scaling Oracle RAC

To determine when to scale the Oracle RAC environment by adding nodes, Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) 11g R1 Grid Control and native system tools were used to monitor utilization on the Oracle RAC database nodes. When CPU and memory utilization reached 80% of available resources for the Oracle RAC database nodes, one Oracle RAC node and one Oracle EBS node was added to the environment to provide sufficient resources for additional users to perform tasks within the Oracle EBS environment.

Step Action

1. Add a virtual Oracle RAC node to the cluster.

2. Add an Oracle RAC instance to the new node.

3. Register the instance with the listener on the new node.

Note: For additional information, refer to Adding and Deleting Oracle RAC Nodes for Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 [ID 1134753.1] or Oracle Clusterware Administration and Deployment Guide 11g Release 2 (11.2).


Scaling the Application Tier

To add a node to the Oracle EBS application tier, the following steps were performed.

Step Action

1. Prepare the environment.

2. Configure the new application node.

3. Update profile options.

4. Verify the APPLCSF variable setting .

5. Update the SESSION_COOKIE_DOMAIN value in ICX_PARAMETERS.

6. Configure load balancing.

7. Configure parallel concurrent processing.

Test Results and Analysis

Load testing was also conducted and performance measured after adding one Oracle RAC database node and one Oracle EBS application node to the virtual Oracle environment. This demonstrated elasticity while scaling out and scaling up. Figure 7 shows the average application response time (in seconds) per transaction while scaling out the virtual environment compared to performance in the physical and virtual environment with no scaling factor.

Figure 7. Average Application Response Times—While Scaling Out


The major findings are:

1. A comparison of the average 90th percentile response time for each transaction before and after scaling out in the vSphere 4.1 environment on the Vblock platform showed that response times were 21% lower after scaling out.

2. Performance in the scaled-out virtual environment was only 3.8% lower than performance in the physical environment.

3. Additional resources can be provisioned on-demand to meet customer requirements for future growth.

4. Scaling out and scaling up Oracle EBS and RAC on the Vblock platform improves performance.


Conclusion

Results from the performance and scalability testing of Oracle EBS in a physical and virtual Oracle RAC environment show that the benefits of virtualization provide a high level of return on investment (ROI) and reduced total cost of ownership (TCO) for customers wishing to migrate from a physical to virtual environment on the Vblock platform. The performance delta is not significant for transactions executed for Oracle EBS applications based on test results demonstrated by VCE.

Next Steps

To learn more about this and other solutions, contact a VCE representative or visit www.vce.com.

References

Vblock™ Infrastructure Platform Architecture Overview

Zero Downtime Bi-directional Physical to Virtual Migration for Oracle® EBS R12 With RAC on Vblock™ Infrastructure Platforms

My Oracle Support Notes

Cloning Oracle Applications Release 12 with Rapid Clone (Doc ID 406982.1)

Using Oracle 11g Release 2 Real Application Clusters with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 (Doc ID 823587.1)

Using Load Balancers with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 (Doc ID 380489.1)

Configuration of Load Balancing and Transparent Application Failover (Doc ID 226880.1)

How to Implement Load Balancing With RAC Configured System Using JDBC (Doc ID 247135.1)

Using Cisco ACE Series Application Control Engine with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 (Doc ID 603325.1)

Sharing the Application Tier File System in Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 (Doc ID 384248)

http://www.vce.com/

http://www.vce.com/vblock/

http://www.vce.com/insights/


http://support.oracle.com/


Appendix A

This appendix describes the tools used to measure performance and the workflow used to generate workload for performance testing.

Preparing the Test Environment

The following table describes how the performance test environment was set up.

Step Action Notes

1. Install and configure a split-node Oracle EBS R12 (12.1.1) environment consisting of one application tier server and one Oracle 11g database tier server.

Refer to the appropriate Oracle documentation for instructions.

2. Create a 2-node physical Oracle RAC. Refer to the appropriate Oracle documentation for instructions.

3. Migrate the physical Oracle RAC to the virtual VMware vSphere 4 environment.

Refer to Zero Downtime Bi-directional Physical to Virtual Migration for Oracle® EBS R12 With RAC on Vblock™ Infrastructure Platforms for instructions.

4. Clone the virtual Oracle EBS and RAC environment to the physical environment using EMC storage replication technology with Oracle Rapid Clone Technology.

Refer to Cloning Oracle Applications Release 12 with Rapid Clone (Doc ID 406982.1) for detailed information.

Test Tools

The following table describes the tools used to generate load and collect measurements.

Tool Description

HP LoadRunner 11 Emulates hundreds or thousands of concurrent users to apply consistent, measurable, and repeatable production workloads to application platforms.

Supports performance testing for a wide range of application environments and protocols, including Oracle.

SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)

Delivers detailed monitoring and analysis of performance data from routers, switches, servers, and other SNMP-enabled devices.

Automatically discovers network devices and shows performance statistics in real time through dynamic network maps.

Includes out-of-the-box dashboards, alerts, reports, and best practice thresholds.







Tool Description

Oracle Automatic Workload Repository (AWR) and Automatic Database Diagnostic Monitor (ADDM

AWR stores statistical data needed for diagnostics. ADDM analyzes data in the AWR to identify potential performance

bottlenecks. For each of the identified issues it locates the root cause and provides recommendations for correcting the problem.

ADDM performs analysis task, its findings and recommendations stored in the database every time an AWR snapshot is taken

Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) 11g R1 Grid Control

Monitors and maintains a highly available environment across all tiers of the application stack.

Monitors both physical and virtual Oracle environments. Provides the ability to monitor and administer host environments

including operating system, network, and storage configurations.

EMC Symmetrix Performance Analyzer (SPA)

Simplifies analysis of Symmetrix performance trends. Provides intuitive application monitoring in real-time Provides diagnostic drill-down capability to identify the root cause of

performance issues

EMC STP Analyzes performance for Symmetrix and host systems after data collection completed.

Uses collected data to create displays of Symmetrix and host performance along with configuration data.

VMware esxtop Displays information about the state of the physical server running an ESX Server.

Lists CPU utilization for each physical processor, memory utilization, and disk and network bandwidth for each network and disk device available to the ESX Server machine.

Lists CPU and memory utilization for each individual VMkernel world.

Workload Description

The following table describes the customized Order to Cash (O2C) workflow used to generate workload for the performance and scalability testing. This workload demonstrates the performance and scalability of Oracle Applications and provides metrics for comparing Oracle Applications performance on different system configurations. The transactions were scripted using HP LoadRunner and executed under predefined user loads. Each user executes the transactions as part of the O2C process.

Step Description

1. Enter Order/Create Sales Order

The cycle begins in the Order Management Module where an order is created with about 4 lines. This order is then booked and passed to Pick Release.

2. Pick Release Pick Release finds and releases the order and creates a move order request. The process of transacting move orders creates a reservation against the source sub-inventory.

3. Ship Confirm Ship Confirm is the process of confirming that items have shipped. Shipping execution confirms that the delivery lines associated with the delivery have shipped. Interface Trip Stop (ITS) creates a trip and related stops for all eligible deliveries that have not been assigned to a trip. The ITS process happens automatically when you ship confirm the order.


Step Description

4. Workflow Background Process

To create an Invoice from the Shipped/Closed order lines, the Workflow Background Process, OM Order Line, must run to interface eligible order lines into Accounts Receivable (AR) as invoices. In most production/customer environments, this process is set up to run automatically as prescribed by business requirements. For this test, this process will be manually submitted after the completion of ITS.

5. Receivables Query Invoice

An invoice is created based on the customer and the items that were ordered previously.


ABOUT VCE VCE, the Virtual Computing Environment Company formed by Cisco and EMC with investments from VMware and Intel, accelerates the adoption of converged infrastructure and cloud-based computing models that dramatically reduce the cost of IT while improving time to market for our customers. VCE, through the Vblock platform, delivers the industry's first completely integrated IT offering with end-to-end vendor accountability. VCE's prepackaged solutions are available through an extensive partner network, and cover horizontal applications, vertical industry offerings, and application development environments, allowing customers to focus on business innovation instead of integrating, validating and managing IT infrastructure. For more information, go to www.vce.com.

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Oracle E-Business Suite and RAC Performance and Elasticity on