Provisioning Oracle Exalogic: What's Involved

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In this interview from 2012, Marshall Choy explains to dear old Justin how Oracle's engineered systems and optimized solutions will impact the job of a sysadmin.

I was just reading a recently published Oracle White Paper that goes into a little more detail...

"While the core middleware or applications administration role is largely the same as for non-Exalogic environments, significantly less work is required to manage storage, OS, and networks. In addition, some administration tasks are simplified."

That sounded interesting, so I kept reading. Here is an excerpt of what it says about provisioning.

Provisioning New Environments

Provisioning is done so frequently in some organizations that it's almost a continuous effort. Exalogic was designed as a multi-tenant environment in which many applications and user communities can operate in secure isolation, but all running on a shared compute infrastructure. As a result, provisioning environments for development, testing or other projects is simply a case of re-configuring these existing shared resources. And it takes hours rather than weeks.

The typical steps involved are:

1. Storage – using the ZFS BUI
1. Create NFS v4 shares
2. Define Access Control List
2. Compute nodes – via standard OS commands
1. Decide which nodes are to be used for this project. In the current Exalogic X3-2 machines each node has 16 processing cores and 256 GB RAM. For each node:
1. Create the root OS user, if it does not already exist.
2. Add a mount point entry for the shared storage to the /etc/fstab file and issue the mount command to enable access to it from the compute node.
3. Network – using the Exalogic IB subnet manager
1. Identify IP addresses for the compute nodes to be used. Add any new virtual IP addresses to be used to ensure middleware high availability.
2. Define new virtual network interfaces (VNICs) to enable connections to Exalogic from the rest of the data Center.
3. Associate the pre-set external facing IP addresses to the VNICs.
4. Define Exalogic Infiniband partitions to create secure groups of compute nodes / processors.

No physical cabling is required as network configuration is defined at the software level. In the event of a major failure, however, you may need to re-image the OS on some or even all compute nodes as a faster alternative to restoring from backup.

This whole process should take no more than an hour, after which a new, fully functioning compute platform is available for the project. It does not require any other data Center resources.

Further details are available in the Exalogic Enterprise Deployment Guide

I'll keep reading it and sharing some nuggets here. See the entire paper.

- Rick

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