Siebel 8.1.1.4 Benchmark on SPARC T5

Hardly six months after announcing Siebel 8.1.1.4 benchmark results on Oracle SPARC T4 servers, we have a brand new set of Siebel 8.1.1.4 benchmark results on Oracle SPARC T5 servers. There are no updates to the Siebel benchmark kit in the last couple years - so, we continued to use the Siebel 8.1.1.4 benchmark workload to measure the performance of Siebel Financial Services Call Center and Order Management business transactions on the recently announced SPARC T5 servers.

Benchmark Details

The latest Siebel 8.1.1.4 benchmark was executed on a mix of SPARC T5-2, SPARC T4-2 and SPARC T4-1 servers. The benchmark test simulated the actions of a large corporation with 40,000 concurrent active users. To date, this is the highest user count we achieved in a Siebel benchmark.

User Load Breakdown & Achieved Throughput

Siebel Application Module	%Total Load	#Users	Business Trx per Hour
Financial Services Call Center	70	28,000	273,786
Order Management	30	12,000	59,553
Total	100	40,000	333,339

Average Transaction Response Times for both Financial Services Call Center and Order Management transactions were under one second.

Software & Hardware Specification

Test Component	Software	Version	Server Model	Server Qty	Per Server Specification						OS
					Chips	Cores	vCPUs	CPU Speed	CPU Type	Memory
Application Server	Siebel	8.1.1.4	SPARC T5-2	2	2	32	256	3.6 GHz	SPARC-T5	512 GB	Solaris 10 1/13 (S10U11)
Database Server	Oracle 11g R2	11.2.0.2	SPARC T4-2	1	2	16	128	2.85 GHz	SPARC-T4	256 GB	Solaris 10 8/11 (S10U10)
Web Server	iPlanet Web Server	7.0.9 (7 U9)	SPARC T4-1	1	1	8	64	2.85 GHz	SPARC-T4	128 GB	Solaris 10 8/11 (S10U10)
Load Generator	Oracle Application Test Suite	9.21.0043	SunFire X4200	1	2	4	4	2.6 GHz	AMD Opteron 285 SE	16 GB	Windows 2003 R2 SP2
Load Drivers (Agents)	Oracle Application Test Suite	9.21.0043	SunFire X4170	8	2	12	12	2.93 GHz	Intel Xeon X5670	48 GB	Windows 2003 R2 SP2

Additional Notes:

• Siebel Gateway Server was configured to run on one of the application server nodes
• Four Siebel application servers were configured in the Siebel Enterprise to handle 40,000 concurrent users
  • - Each SPARC T5-2 was configured to run two Siebel application server instances
  • - Each of the Siebel application server instances on SPARC T5-2 servers were separated using Solaris virtualization technology, Zones
  • - 40,000 concurrent user sessions were load balanced across all four Siebel application server instances
• Siebel database was hosted on a Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array consisting 80 x 24 GB flash modules (FMODs)
  • - Siebel 8.1.1.4 benchmark workload is not I/O intensive and does not require flash storage for better I/O performance
• Fourteen iPlanet Web Server virtual servers were configured with Siebel Web Server Extension (SWSE) plug-in to handle 40,000 concurrent user load
  • - All fourteen iPlanet Web Server instances forwarded HTTP requests from Siebel clients to all four Siebel application server instances in a round robin fashion
• Oracle Application Test Suite (OATS) was stable and held up amazingly well over the entire duration of the test run.
  • - The test ran for more than five hours including a three hour ramp up state
  • - While we are at it, do not forget to check the Oracle Application Testing Suite (OATS): Few Tips & Tricks page
• The benchmark test results were validated and thoroughly audited by the Siebel benchmark and PSR teams
  • - Nothing new here. All Sun published Siebel benchmarks including the SPARC T4 one were properly audited before releasing those to the outside world

Resource Utilization

Component	#Users	CPU%	Memory Footprint
Gateway/Application Server	20,000	67.03	205.54 GB
Application Server	20,000	66.09	206.24 GB
Database Server	40,000	33.43	108.72 GB
Web Server	40,000	29.48	14.03 GB

Finally, how does this benchmark stack up against other published benchmarks? Short answer is "very well". Head over to the Oracle Siebel Benchmark White Papers webpage to do the comparison yourself.

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[Credit to our hard working colleagues in SAE, Siebel PSR, benchmark and Oracle Platform Integration (OPI) teams. Special thanks to Sumti Jairath and Venkat Krishnaswamy for the last minute fire drill]

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SuperCluster Best Practices : Deploying Oracle 11g Database in Zones

To be clear, this post is about a white paper that's been out there for more than two months. Access it through the following url.

  Best Practices for Deploying Oracle Solaris Zones with Oracle Database 11g on SPARC SuperCluster

The focus of the paper is on databases and zones. On SuperCluster, customers have the choice of running their databases in logical domains that are dedicated to running Oracle Database 11g R2. With exclusive access to Exadata Storage Servers, those domains are aptly called "Database" domains. If the requirement mandates, it is possible to create and use all logical domains as "database domains" or "application domains" or a mix of those. Since the focus is on databases, the paper talks only about the database domains and how zones can be created, configured and used within each database domain for fine grained control over multiple databases consolidated in a SuperCluster environment.

When multiple databases are being consolidated (including RAC databases) in database logical domains, zones are one of the options that fulfill requirements such as the fault, operation, network, security and resource isolation, multiple RAC instances in a single logical domain, separate identity and independent manageability for database instances.

The best practices cover the following topics. Some of those are applicable to standalone, non-engineered environments as well.

Solaris Zones

• CPU, memory and disk space allocation
• Zone Root on Sun ZFS Storage Appliance
• Network configuration
• Use of DISM
• Use of ZFS filesystem
• SuperCluster specific zone deployment tool, ssc_exavm
• ssctuner utility

Oracle Database

• Exadata Storage Grid (Disk Group) Configuration
• Disk Group Isolation
  • Shared Storage approach
  • Dedicated Storage Server approach
• Resizing Grid Disks

Oracle RAC Configuration
Securing the Databases, and

Example Database Consolidation Scenarios

• Consolidation example using Half-Rack SuperCluster
• Consolidation example using Full-Rack SuperCluster

Acknowledgements

A large group of experts reviewed the material and provided quality feedback. Hence they deserve credit for their work and time. Listed below are some of those reviewers (sincere apologies if I missed listing any major contributors).

Kesari Mandyam, Binoy Sukumaran, Gowri Suserla, Allan Packer, Jennifer Glore, Hazel Alabado, Tom Daly, Krishnan Shankar, Gurubalan T, Rich long, Prasad Bagal, Lawrence To, Rene Kundersma, Raymond Dutcher, David Brean, Jeremy Ward, Suzi McDougall, Ken Kutzer, Larry Mctintosh, Roger Bitar, Mikel Manitius

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OBIEE 11g Benchmark on SPARC T4

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.

    SPARC T4 Server Delivers Outstanding Performance on Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g

Benchmark Details

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]

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[Tip] Samsung Galaxy S II: Turning off Camera Shutter Sound

It is one of the hot topics among Galaxy S II users. In web forums, some of the recurring solutions appear to be rooting the phone or muting the "system" sounds. They seem to work in some cases. However there is a much simpler solution for Galaxy S II phones running Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) version of Android.

Steps:

1. Launch the Camera application

2. Tap the Menu key button to bring up "Edit Shortcuts" menu

   

3. Tap "Edit Shortcuts" menu item to list out all available shortcuts

   

4. Look for "Shutter sound" shortcut

5. Press, hold and drag the "Shutter sound" option to one of the empty boxes shown on top. If there are no empty boxes, simply drop it on to one of the non-empty boxes that contain the least desired shortcut/option.

   

6. Finally tap on "Shutter sound" icon and select the "Off" button to keep the camera shutter silent

   

PS:
Screenshots were captured using T-Mobile Samsung Galaxy S II (SGH-T989) device running Android 4.0.3

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Siebel 8.1.1.4 Benchmark on SPARC T4

Siebel is a multi-threaded native application that performs well on Oracle's T-series SPARC hardware. We have several versions of Siebel benchmarks published on previous generation T-series servers ranging from Sun Fire T2000 to Oracle SPARC T3-4. So, it is natural to see that tradition extended to the current genration SPARC T4 as well.

Benchmark Details

29,000 user Siebel 8.1.1.4 benchmark on a mix of SPARC T4-1 and T4-2 servers was announced during the Oracle OpenWorld 2012 event. In this benchmark, Siebel application server instances ran on three SPARC T4-2/Solaris 10 8/11 systems where as the Oracle database server 11gR2 was configured on a single SPARC T4-1/Solaris 11 11/11 system. Several iPlanet web server 7 U9 instances with the Siebel Web Plug-in (SWE) installed ran on one SPARC T4-1/Solaris 10 8/11 system. Siebel database was hosted on a single Sun Storage F5100 flash array consisting 80 flash modules (FMODs) each with capacity 24 GB.

Siebel Call Center and Order Management System are the modules that were tested in the benchmark. The benchmark workload had 70% of virtual users running Siebel Call Center transactions and the remaining 30% vusers running Siebel Order Management System transactions. This benchmark on T4 exhibited sub-second response times on average for both Siebel Call Center and Order Management System modules.

Load balancing at various layers including web and test client systems ensured near uniform load across all web and application server instances. All three Siebel application server systems consumed ~78% CPU on average. The database and web server systems consumed ~53% and ~18% CPU respectively.

All these details are supposed to be available in a standard Oracle|Siebel benchmark template - but for some reason, I couldn't find it on Oracle's Siebel Benchmark White Papers web page yet. Meanwhile check out the following PR that was posted on oracle.com on 09/28/2012.

    SPARC T4 Servers Set World Record on Siebel CRM 8.1.1.4 Benchmark

Looks like the large number of vusers (29,000 to be precise) sets this benchmark apart from the other benchmarks published with the same Siebel 8.1.1.4 benchmark workload.

[Credit to our colleagues in Siebel PSR, benchmark, SAE and ISVe teams]

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Solaris Tips : CPU Cache Sizes, Changing System Date

Tip #1: Finding the CPU cache sizes from Solaris operating environment

Use the prtpicl utility to list out system configuration, and look for the cache sizes within that output.

eg.,

$ prtpicl -v |grep cache
              :l1-icache-size    0x10000
              :l1-icache-line-size       0x40
              :l1-icache-associativity   0x2
              :l1-dcache-size    0x10000
              :l1-dcache-line-size       0x40
              :l1-dcache-associativity   0x2
              :l2-cache-size     0x500000
              :l2-cache-line-size        0x100
              :l2-cache-associativity    0xa

[Updated 01/14/13] The above output was gathered from an M4000 system that has SPARC64 VII processors.

Recent update releases of Solaris 10 and 11 show the prtpicl reported cache sizes in decimal numbers.

Here is a slightly improved prtpicl command that filters out unwanted output. (Courtesy: Georg)

/usr/sbin/prtpicl -v -c cpu | egrep "^ +cpu|ID|cache"

Tip #2: Changing the System Date

Use date to change the system date. For example, to set the system date to March 9, 2008 08:15 AM, run the following command. Syntax: date mmddHHMMyy

#date 0309081508

Sun Mar 9 08:15:03 PST 2008

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emca fails with "Database instance is unavailable" though available

The following example shows the symptoms of failure, and the exact error message.

$ emca -repos create

...
Password for SYSMAN user:  

Do you wish to continue? [yes(Y)/no(N)]: Y
Nov 19, 2012 10:33:42 AM oracle.sysman.emcp.DatabaseChecks checkDbAvailabilityImpl
WARNING: ORA-01034: ORACLE not available

Nov 19, 2012 10:33:42 AM oracle.sysman.emcp.DatabaseChecks throwDBUnavailableException
SEVERE: 
Database instance is unavailable. Fix the ORA error thrown and run EM Configuration Assistant again.

Some of the possible reasons may be : 

1) Database may not be up. 
2) Database is started setting environment variable ORACLE_HOME with trailing '/'. Reset ORACLE_HOME and bounce the database. 

For eg. Database is started setting environment variable ORACLE_HOME=/scratch/db/ . Reset ORACLE_HOME=/scratch/db  and bounce the database.

Fix:

Ensure that the ORACLE_HOME is pointing to the right location in $ORACLE_HOME/bin/emca file.

Rather than installing from scratch, if ORACLE_HOME was copied over from another location, likely it results in wrong location for ORACLE_HOME in several Enterprise Manager (EM) specific scripts and files. It usually happens when the directory structure on the target machine is not identical to the structure on the original/source machine, including the top level directory location where Oracle RDBMS was installed properly using the installer.

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