Oracle's Optimized Solution for PeopleSoft HCM 9.0

According to Oracle Corporation: Oracle's optimized solutions are applications-to-disk solutions that are comprised of Oracle's Sun servers, storage, and networking components, Oracle Solaris, Oracle Enterprise Linux, Oracle Database, Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Applications.

To be clear, an optimized/optimal solution is neither a software package nor a hardware system bundled with pre-tuned software. It is simply a set of recommendations based on some testing performed in labs. The recommendations typically provide sizing guidelines for small, medium and large configurations, best practices, tuning tips and some performance data. Customers can refer to these guidelines when deploying enterprise applications on Oracle hardware to achieve optimal configuration for better TCO and ROI.

The PeopleSoft solution implements two modules in Oracle PeopleSoft Enterprise Human Capital Management (HCM) 9.0 to demonstrate how Oracleʼs servers, disk storage and advanced flash based storage technology can be used to accelerate database transactions to achieve unprecedented application performance. Workload consolidation is achieved through server consolidation while maintaining the appropriate balance of performance, availability, cost and expected future capacity requirements.

The optimized solution technical white paper can be accessed from the following URL:

    Oracleʼs Optimized Solution for PeopleSoft Human Capital Management Consolidation using M-series servers, Flash and Enterprise Storage

A corresponding solution brief targeting less patient is available at:

    Oracle's Optimized Solution for PeopleSoft HCM - A Business White paper

(Original blogpost location:
http://blogs.sun.com/mandalika/entry/oracle_s_optimized_solution_for)

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Instructions to Turn ON/OFF Hardware Prefetch on SPARC64 Systems

The hardware prefetch is ON by default on M-series servers such as M8000/M9000, M4000/M5000, M3000

The following excerpt is from a SPARC64 document:

Hardware speculatively issues the prefetch operation based on the prediction that there is high possibility to access to the following continuous address in the future, if there have been load accesses for a consecutive address.

Although this feature is designed to improve the performance of various workloads, due to the speculative nature, not all workloads may benefit with the default behavior. For example, in our experiments, we noticed 10+% improvement in CPU utilization while running some of the PeopleSoft workloads on M-series hardware with hardware prefetch turned off. Hence irrespective of the application/workload, the recommended approach is to conduct few experiments by running representative customer workloads on target M-series hardware with and without the hardware prefetch turned on.

Instructions to Turn On/Off Hardware Prefetch:

1. Connect to the system Service Processor (XSCF)

   
   % ssh -l <userid> <host>
   

2. Check the current prefetch mode by running the following command at XSCF> prompt

   
   XSCF> showprefetchmode
   

3. Find the domain id of all mounted system boards (or skip to next step)

   
   XSCF> showboards -a
   

4. Power-off all configured domains

   
   XSCF> poweroff -d <domainid> [OR]
   XSCF> poweroff -a
   

   From my experience, on larger systems with multiple domains configured, all domains must be powered off before the SP lets changing the prefetch mode. If someone has a correction to this information or better instruction that minimizes disruption, please let me know. I'd be happy to update these instructions.

5. Wait until the domain(s) are completely powered off. Check the status by running showlogs command

   
   XSCF> showlogs power
   

6. Change the prefetch mode to the desired value

   
   XSCF> setprefetchmode -s [on|off]
   

7. Verify the prefetch mode

   
   XSCF> showprefetchmode
   

8. Finally power-on all configured domains

   
   XSCF> poweron -d <domainid> [OR]
   XSCF> poweron -a
   

9. Disconnect from SP, and wait for the OS to boot up

Note to Sun-Oracle customers:

If the default value of hardware prefetch is changed, please make sure to mention this in any service requests, bug reports, etc., that you may file with Oracle Corporation. Unfortunately none of the standard commands on Solaris report the status of hardware prefetch - so, providing this additional piece of information beforehand will help the person who is analyzing/diagnosing the case.

+Original blog post URL

        http://blogs.sun.com/mandalika/entry/instructions_to_turn_on_off

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Instructions to Restore Files from a Windows Filesystem using Ubuntu Live CD

Windows users who have not interacted with any kind of UNIX or Linux distribution before are the target audience of this HOW-TO blog post.

1. Download the latest version of Ubuntu 32-bit ISO image from the following location:

           http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download

2. Burn the ISO image onto a CD or DVD so you can try running Ubuntu Linux from the CD (Live CD option)

3. On the target system (running Windows or any other OS but does not recognize the disk drive(s) containing Windows FS) boot Linux from the CD or DVD that you burned

4. Once the OS boots up: launch the partition editor

   

5. Look for NTFS, FAT or FAT32 filesystems and note down the corresponding partition names.

   

   In the example, /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda2 are the Windows filesystems.

6. Launch system terminal (command line interface)

   

7. Mount the Windows filesystem using the "mount" command.

   

8. Finally navigate to the mounted filesystem using the graphical user interface.

   
   
   
   
   

9. Insert an USB flash device

   Ubuntu recognizes the USB drive and mounts it automatically. Type "df -h" on the command line terminal and look for "NO NAME". "NO NAME" filesystem is the USB file system.

10. Backup your files from the Windows filesystem to the USB filesystem

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SPARC T3 reiterates Siebel CRM's Supremacy on T-series Hardware

It's been mentioned and proved several times that Sun/Oracle's T-series hardware is the best fit to deploy and run Siebel CRM. Feel free to browse through the list of Siebel benchmarks that Sun published in the past on T-series:

        2004-2010 : A Look Back at Sun Published Oracle Benchmarks

Oracle Corporation announced the availability of SPARC T3 servers in Oracle OpenWorld 2010, and sure enough there is a Siebel CRM benchmark on SPARC T3-1 server to support the server launch event. Check the following web page for high level details of the benchmark.

        SPARC T3-1 Server Posts a High Score on New Siebel CRM 8.1.1 Benchmark

I intend to provide the missing pieces of information in this blog post.

First of all, it is not a "Platform Sizing and Performance Program" (PSPP) benchmark. Siebel 8.1.1 was used to run the benchmark, and there is no Siebel PSPP benchmark kit available as of today for v8.1.1. Hence the test results from this benchmark exercise are not directly comparable to the Siebel 8.0 PSPP benchmark results.

Workload

The benchmark workload consists of a mix of Siebel Financial Services Call Center and Siebel Web Services / EAI transactions. The FINS Call Center transactions create a bunch of Opportunities, Quotes and Orders, where as the Web Services / EAI transactions submit new Service Requests (SR), search for and update existing SRs. The transaction mix is 40% FINS Call Center transactions and 60% Web Services / EAI transactions.

Software Versions

• Siebel CRM 8.1.1
• Oracle RDBMS 11g R2 (11.2.0.1), 64-bit
• iPlanet Web Server 7.0 Update 8, 32-bit
• Solaris 10 09/10 in the application-tier and
• Solaris 10 10/09 in the web- and database-tiers

Hardware Configuration

• Application Server : 1 x SPARC T3-1 Server (2 RU system)
  • One socket 16-Core 1.65 GHz SPARC T3 processor, 128 hardware threads, 6 MB L2 Cache, 64 GB RAM
• Web Server + Database Server : 1 x Sun SPARC Enterprise T5240 Server (2 RU system)
  • Two socket 16-Core 1.165 GHz UltraSPARC T2 Plus processors, 128 hardware threads, 4 MB L2 Cache, 64 GB RAM

Virtualization Technology

iPlanet Web Server and the Oracle 11g Database Server were configured on a single Sun SPARC Enterprise T5240 Server. Those software layers were isolated from each other with the help of Oracle Solaris Containers virtualization technology. Resource allocations are shown below.

Tier	#vCPU	Memory (GB)
Database	96	48
Web	32	16

Test Results

#vUsers	Avg Trx Resp Time (sec)		Business Trx Throughput/HR		Avg CPU Utilization (%)			Avg Memory Footprint (GB)
	FINS	EAI	FINS	EAI	App	DB	Web	App	DB + Web
13,000	0.43	0.2	48,409	116,449	58	42	37	52	35

Why stop at 13K users?

Notice that the average CPU utilization on the application server node (SPARC T3-1) is only ~58%. The application server node has room to accommodate more online vusers - however, there is not enough free memory left on the server to scale beyond 13,000 concurrent users. That is the main reason to stop at 13,000 user count in this benchmark.

Siebel Best Practices

Check the following presentation:

        Siebel on Oracle Solaris : Best Practices, Tuning Tips

Acknowledgments

Credit to all our peers at Oracle Corporation who helped us with the hardware, workload, verification and validation etc., in a timely manner. Also Jenny deserves special credit for spending enormous amount of time running the benchmark with patience.

Original blog post URL:
http://blogs.sun.com/mandalika/entry/sparc_t3_reiterates_siebel_s

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Is it really Solaris Versus Windows & Linux?

(Even though the title explicitly states "Solaris Versus .. ", this blog entry is equally applicable to all the operating systems in the world with few changes.)

Lately I have seen quite a few e-mails and heard few customer representatives talking about the performance of their application(s) on Solaris, Windows and Linux. Typically they go like the following with a bunch of supporting data (all numbers) and no hardware configuration specified whatsoever.

• "Transaction X is nearly twice as slow on Solaris compared to the same transaction running on Windows or Linux"
• "Transaction X runs much faster on my Windows laptop than on a Solaris box"

Lack of awareness and taking the hardware completely out of the discussions and context are the biggest problems with complaints like these. Those claims make sense only when the underlying hardware is the same in all test cases. For example, comparing a single user, single threaded transaction running on Windows, Linux and Solaris on x86 hardware is appropriate (as long as the type and speed of the processor are identical), but not against Solaris running on SPARC hardware. This is mainly because the processor architecture is completely different for x86 and SPARC platforms.

Besides, these days Oracle offers two types of SPARC hardware - 1. T-series and 2. M-series, which serve different purposes though they are compatible with each other. It is hard to compare and analyze the performance discrimination between different SPARC offerings (T- and M-series) too with no proper understanding of the characteristics of the CPUs in use. Choosing the right hardware for the right job is the key.

It is improper to compare the business transactions running on x86 with SPARC systems or even between different types of SPARC systems, and to incorrectly attribute the hardware strength or weakness to the operating system that runs on top of the bare metal. If there is so much of discrepancy among different operating environments, it is recommended to spend some time understanding the nuances in testing hardware before spending enormous amounts of time trying to tune the application and the operating system.

The bottomline: in addition to the software (application + OS), hardware plays an important role in the performance and scalability of an application - so, unless the testing hardware is the same for all test cases on different operating systems, don't you just focus on the operating system alone and make hasty decisions to switch to other operating platforms. Carefully choose appropriate hardware for the task in hand.

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OOW 2010 : Accelerate and Bullet-Proof Your Siebel CRM Deployment with Oracle's Sun Servers

The best practices slides from today's OpenWorld presentation can be downloaded from the following location.

        Siebel on Oracle Solaris : Best Practices, Tuning Tips

The entire presentation with proper disclaimers and Oracle Solaris Cluster specific slides will be posted on Oracle's web site soon. Stay tuned.

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Identifying Ideal Oracle Database Objects for Flash Storage and Accelerators

(Originally posted on blogs.sun.com at:
http://blogs.sun.com/mandalika/entry/identifying_ideal_oracle_database_objects)

The Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array and Sun Flash Accelerator F20 PCIe Card help accelerate I/O bound applications such as databases. The following are some of the guidelines to identify Oracle database objects that can benefit by using the flash storage. Even though the title explicitly states "Oracle", some of these guidelines are applicable to other databases and non-database products. Exercise discretion, evaluate and experiment before implementing these recommendations as they are.

• Heavily used database tables and indexes are ideal for flash storage

  • - The database workloads with no I/O bottlenecks may not show significant performance gains

  • - The database workloads with severe I/O bottlenecks can fully realize the benefits of flash devices

    • Top 5 Timed Foreground Events section in any AWR report that was collected on the target database system is useful in finding whether disk I/O is a bottleneck

      • Large number of Waits and the large amount of time in DB spent waiting for some blocked resource under User I/O Wait Class is an indication of I/O contention on the system

• Identify the I/O intensive tables and indexes in a database with the help of Oracle Enterprise Manager Database Control, a web-based tool for managing Oracle database(s)

  • - The "Performance" page in OEM Database Control helps you quickly identify and analyze performance problems
  • - Historical and the real-time database activity can be viewed from the "performance" page.
    • The same page also provides information about the top resource consuming database objects

• An alternate way to identify the I/O intensive objects in a database is to analyze the AWR reports that are generated over a period of time especially when the database is busy

  • - Scan through the SQL ordered by .. tables in each AWR report
  • - Look for the top INSERT & UPDATE statements with more elapsed and DB times

    • The database tables that are updated frequently & repeatedly, along with the indexes created on such tables are good candidates for the flash devices

  • - SQL ordered by Reads is useful in identifying the database tables with large number of physical reads

    • The database table(s) from which large amounts of data is read/fetched from physical disk(s) are also good candidates for the flash devices

      • To identify I/O intensive indexes, look through the explain plans of the top SQLs that are sorted by Physical Reads

• Examine the File IO Stats section in any AWR report that was collected on the target database system

  • - Consider moving the database files with heavy reads, writes and relatively high average buffer wait time to flash volumes

• Examine Segments by Physical Reads, Segments by Physical Writes and Segments by Buffer Busy Waits sections in AWR report

  • - The database tables and indexes with large number of physical reads, physical writes and buffer busy waits may benefit from the flash acceleration

• Sun flash storage may not be ideal for storing Oracle redo logs

  • - Sun Flash Modules (FMOD) in F5100 array and F20 Flash Accelerator Card are optimized for 4K sector size

    A redo log write that is not aligned with the beginning of the 4K physical sector results in a significant performance degradation

  • - In general, Oracle redo log files default to a block size that is equal to the physical sector size of the disk, which is typically 512 bytes

    • Majority of the recent Oracle Database platforms detect the 4K sector size on Sun flash devices
    • Oracle database automatically creates redo log files with a 4K block size on file systems created on Sun flash devices

      • However with a block size of 4K for the redo logs, there will be significant increase in redo wastage that may offset expected performance gains

F5100 Flash Storage and F20 PCIe Flash Accelerator Card as Oracle Database Smart Flash Cache

In addition to the I/O intensive database objects, customers running Oracle 11g Release 2 or later versions have the flexibility of using flash devices to turn on the "Database Smart Flash Cache" feature to reduce physical disk I/O. The Database Smart Flash Cache is a transparent extension of the database buffer cache using flash storage technology. The flash storage acts as a Level 2 cache to the (Level 1) SGA. Database Smart Flash Cache can significantly improve the performance of Oracle databases by reducing the amount of disk I/O at a much lower cost than adding an equivalent amount of RAM.

F20 Flash Accelerator offers an additional benefit - since it is a PCIe card, the I/O operations bypass disk controller overhead.

The database flash cache can be enabled by setting appropriate values to the following Oracle database parameters.

 db_flash_cache_file
 db_flash_cache_size

Check Oracle Database Administrator's Guide 11g Release 2 (11.2) : Configuring Database Smart Flash Cache documentation for the step-by-step instructions to configure Database Smart Flash Cache on flash devices.

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