Just like the Siebel 8.1.x/SPARC T4 benchmark post, this one too was overdue for at least four months. In any case, I hope the Oracle BI customers already knew about the OBIEE 11g/SPARC T4 benchmark effort. In here I will try to provide few additional / interesting details that aren't covered in the following Oracle PR that was posted on oracle.com on 09/30/2012.
System Under Test
The entire BI middleware stack including the WebLogic 11g Server, OBI Server, OBI Presentation Server and Java Host was installed and configured on a single SPARC T4-4 server consisting four 8-Core 3.0 GHz SPARC T4 processors (total #cores: 32) and 128 GB physical memory. Oracle Solaris 10 8/11 is the operating system.
BI users were authenticated against Oracle Internet Directory (OID) in this benchmark - hence OID software which was part of Oracle Identity Management 11.1.1.6.0 was also installed and configured on the system under test (SUT). Oracle BI Server's Query Cache was turned on, and as a result, most of the query results were cached in OBIS layer, that resulted in minimal database activity making it ideal to have the Oracle 11g R2 database server with the OBIEE database running on the same box as well.
Oracle BI database was hosted on a Sun ZFS Storage 7120 Appliance. The BI Web Catalog was under a ZFS/zpool on a couple of SSDs.
Test Scenario
In this benchmark, 25000 concurrent users assumed five different business user roles -- Marketing Executive, Sales Representative, Sales Manager, Sales Vice-president, and Service Manager. The load was distributed equally among those five business user roles. Each of those different BI users accessed five different pre-built dashboards with each dashboard having an average of five reports - a mix of charts, tables and pivot tables - and returning 50-500 rows of aggregated data. The benchmark test scenario included drilling down into multiple levels from a table or chart within a dashboard. There is a 60 second think time between requests, per user.
BI Setup & Test Results
OBIEE 11g 11.1.1.6.0 was deployed on SUT in a vertical scale-out fashion. Two Oracle BI Presentation Server processes, one Oracle BI Server process, one Java Host process and two instances of WebLogic Managed Servers handled 25,000 concurrent user sessions smoothly. This configuration resulted in a sub-second overall average transaction response time (average of averages over a duration of 120 minutes or 2 hours). On average, 450 business transactions were executed per second, which triggered 750 SQL executions per second.
It took only 52% of CPU on average (~5% system CPU and rest in user land) to do all this work to achieve the throughput outlined above. Since 25,000 unique test/BI users hammered different dashboards consistently, not so surprisingly bulk of the CPU was spent in Oracle BI Presentation Server layer, which took a whopping 29%. BI Server consumed about 10-11% and the rest was shared by Java Host, OID, WebLogic Managed Server instances and the Oracle database.
So, what is the key take away from this whole exercise?
SPARC T4 rocks Oracle BI world. OBIEE 11g/SPARC T4 is an ideal combination that may work well for majority of OBIEE deployments on Solaris platform. Or in marketing jargon - The excellent vertical and horizontal scalability of the SPARC T4 server gives customer the option to scale up as well as scale out growth, to support large BI EE installations, with minimal hardware investment.
Evaluate and decide for yourself.
[Credit to our colleagues in Oracle FMW PSR, ISVe teams and SCA lab support engineers]
