Homepage 5 Tag: E-Business Suite Cloud Manager
First impression on E-Business Suite Cloud Manager 23.1.1

First impression on E-Business Suite Cloud Manager 23.1.1

by | April 28, 2023 | Techblog

Johannes Michler PROMATIS Horus Oracle


Executive Vice President – Head of Platforms & Development

This week, the Oracle E-Business Suite on OCI team released the latest release 23.1.1 of E-Business Suite Cloud manager: “Getting Started with Oracle E-Business Suite on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (Doc ID 2517025.1)”.

Let’s have a quick look at the new features.

New Compute and Database Shapes

Finally, E-Business Suite Cloud Manager is supporting the latest AMD E4.Flex and Intel E3.Flex shapes not only for running the application server or the database tier “on compute” but also with the PaaS service for the database. This is especially important in situations where no / not enough tech licenses for the Database EE are available.

While still with the database PaaS service it is not possible to flexibly scale up and down the available memory as those new shapes have way better performance/price ratio than the previous VM.Standard.2 shapes. Furthermore, typically there is a little bit more memory available which comes in handy especially for small dev/test environments.

For performance measurements on the relevant CPU cores, see the article  Benchmarking CPUs for Oracle E-Business Suite (Database).

The new shapes are nicely integrated into the provisioning flow:

Hopefully, in the future it will be possible to change the memory assigned flexibly there as well – this is something the Database team will need to implement first though.

Furthermore, the new release allows to use VM.Standard3.Flex for Compute instances (Apps- or Database tier). However I still think that E4.Flex provides the better performance/price ratio, so that is not so important for me and my customers so far.

More features

    Beside those new shapes, with the new release the regions Madrid and Chicago can be used.

    Finally, when running the database on Exadata Database Service Dedicated it is now possible to do cloning using snapshots.

    Summary

    Especially the new database service shapes come in very handy for some upcoming projects of ours. I’m looking forward to using those services and will blog again on some insights during that usage soon.

    From a stability point of view the 23.1.1 release luckily so far caused no new regression issues. ?

    First impression on E-Business Suite Cloud Manager 23.1.1

    Migrating E-Business Suite to File Storage Service

    by | December 2, 2022 | Techblog

    Johannes Michler PROMATIS Horus Oracle


    Executive Vice President – Head of Platforms & Development

    Recently, I described that starting with Release 22.2.1, the Oracle E-Business Suite Cloud Manager now supports OCI File Storage Service (FSS) besides block storage. Furthermore, the usage of FSS is mandatory for (new) multi-node environments: First Experience with E-Business Suite Cloud Manager 22.2.1

    Given the advantages of FSS described in my previous blog one of my customers decided to migrate their apps-tier to File Storage Service. Let’s see how we did this:

    Pre-Downtime

    In preparation for the move first of all we had to create a new file system:

    Creating the new file system.

    This file system then has to be attached to a mount target and needs the proper export options:

    NFS Export Options

    Then, the mount point can be mounted in a temporary directory:

    sudo mkdir /mnt/fss
sudo vi /etc/fstab
10.22.9.97:/ENTW220811 /mnt/fss nfs rw,bg,hard,timeo=600,nfsvers=3 0 0

    Then:

    sudo mount /mnt/fss
sudo chown oracle:oinstall /mnt/fss
sudo yum install -y fss-parallel-tools/

    Downtime Operations

    After these preparatory steps, we stop the entire environment and copy the content from the previous /u01 block volume over to the new FSS mount point /mnt/fss. Performance can be greatly improved by using fss-parallel-tools and parcp for this. For volumes of considerable size, an incremental operation can also be handy; but for the 300 GB one usually used for the apps-tier doing the migration in a 1-2 hours downtime is usually not a problem:

    . setenv_run.s
adstpall.sh -mode=allnodes
~/stop_apex122.sh

     

    sudo parcp --restore /u01/install /mnt/fss/

     

    If working in a multi-node environment, then on the second apps-tier the mount through NFS to the primary apps-tier then needs to be replaced with a mount to the FSS mount target.

    After the copy is finished, the old /u01/install mountpoint is retired and FSS is mounted to /u01:

    sudo umount /u01
sudo vi /etc/fstab
10.22.9.97:/ENTW220811 /u01 nfs rw,bg,hard,timeo=600,nfsvers=3 0 0
sudo mount /u01

    Then, start the apps-tier again:

    . setenv_run.s
adstrtal.sh -mode=allnodes
~/start_apex122.shh

    Post Downtime

    After the downtime the old block volume should be detached through the OCI console. Furthermore, it is necessary to re-discover the environment in the E-Business Suite Cloud Manager. For this, either unregister the existing environment or (as I did in order to pick up the latest operating system image and add compatibility with the latest OCI shapes for the Cloud Manager) setup a new Cloud Manager environment. Make sure the Cloud Manager network profile is aware of the FSS Mount Target (usually, you have to create a new network profile for this).

    Then, issue a re-discovery request:

    Rediscovery of the moved environment

    Setup FSS Snapshots

    FSS is a highly durable service. However, that does not help against e.g. user errors (issuing “rm -rf /u01”). To remedy this, it is helpful to setup FSS Snapshots with e.g. an hourly snapshot (kept for a day) plus a daily snapshot (kept for a week). Unfortunately, so far this cannot be setup from the OCI console. Furthermore, for FSS it is currently not possible to perform automatic backups to OCI object storage (this is on the roadmap, though). However, using the utility fss-scheduler, such a backup policy can be easily setup.

    Costs

    As described in my previous post, FSS is considerably more expensive “per gigabyte” (see the oci price list) compared to block storage: 30 cents compared to just around 4.5 cents per GB and month. However due to the “sparse” nature of FSS, for an environment with production plus 3 clones for dev/test our storage usage changed from 4x400GB=1200GB with block storage (equaling roughly 54 USD/month) to 200GB + (3*15) GB = 245 GB (which equals 74 USD/month). The relative increase in costs may still seem significant, compared with the total costs for hosting 4 E-Business Suite environments with terabytes of block storage for the database; these are, however, peanuts. The ratio might even improve if in the future, Oracle will eventually use FSS clones for creating the patch file system (see, and vote for my idea over there).

    Summary

    By performing the above steps, you can migrate an E-Business Suite apps-tier easily to File Storage Service in a downtime of about 1 hour. By doing so, this it is e.g. possible to create very fast clones that are furthermore “sparse”.

    E-Business Suite Cloud Manager 21.1.1 available

    E-Business Suite Cloud Manager 21.1.1 available

    by | July 20, 2021 | Techblog

    Johannes Michler PROMATIS Horus Oracle


    Senior Vice President – Head of Platforms & Development

    Last week Oracle released the latest version of E-Business Suite “Cloud Manager” that can be used to conveniently create and manage E-Business Suite 12.1 or 12.2 environments running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

    I gave the new release a first look and noticed two “big” improvements:

    • Support for “Flex” instances (E.3 and E.4) is now officially available.
    • Licensing of Apps Tier can now be done in a subscription model.

    Flex Instances

    If you regularly read my blog, you may have realized that I’ve already written about this topic multiple times: The AMD Epyc E3 and E4 Instances available in OCI for more than a year provide two killer features:

    • The price/performance ratio is great.
    • It is possible to have a vast amount of memory with a limited number of CPU cores. You can assign up to 64GB per OCPU, in order to e.g. create a testing instance with the “usual amount of SGA/PGA-memory of your PROD” while only licensing 8 VCPU = 4 OCPU=2 DB licenses.

    If you’d like to run such instance on AWS, you’d need to have at least 16 VCPU=8 DB Licenses (order by vcpu).

    Now what is new in this context: Previously, Cloud Manager did not support only the selection of a flexible E4 shape during provisioning or cloning. I’ve usually worked around this by implementing a post-clone script which then changed the shape of the instance from the Intel V2 shape to a flexible E4 instance (at better price/performance ratio).

    This “hack” is now no longer necessary, you can conveniently select in EBS Cloud Manager which shape to use:

    (Fast) Cloning

    The official support for Flex Shapes brings another big advantage: If you had previously converted your instance manually to an E4.Flex type, you were “locked out” out of the fast-cloning capability (using storage means to duplicate an instance). This feature allows the creation of a complete clone of an E-Business Suite of “any size”. I gave this a try for a 5 Terabyte database and the entire cloning process took 90 minutes. It is faster for 12.1.3, but on an 12.2.10 instance with multiple apps tier nodes in different zones, the autoconfig processes for cloning take “quite some time”:

    The process is fully automated and can thus be used to e.g. create a daily clone readily available every morning. Using this very fresh clone, any types of issues can be checked/reproduced on that instance instead of on production.

    Licensing improvements

    As you are probably aware if you read my blog regularly, EBS@OCI is very handy/cost-effective especially when compared to running E-Business Suite on Cloud Environment from “other cloud vendors” (e.g. AWS or Azure, see Techblog here).

    It has e.g. always been (easily) possible to “rent” a license for the database instead of buying/“bringing it yourself”. That can be helpful both for “new E-Business Suite customers” (with all the SaaS out there: yes, that is still something you can find “out in the wild”), or when not having enough DB licenses to e.g. add another (temporary) testing environment.

    So far, this was only possible for the database license. With the release 21.1.1, you can also “rent” the weblogic license needed for the Apps Tier of almost every E-Business Suite environment.

    Summary

    The latest version of E-Business Suite Cloud manager brings a lot of new features. Furthermore, there are no new issues with the release, the upgrade can happen with “just the click of a button”.