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”.