Hello guys

A long thread name? Well the topic is vast, hence the long name. I’ve been dealing with Oracle EBS or applications R12 from last 9 years. Initially I was ONLY developing for the new infrastructure, that gradually changed to taking care of the whole instance.

Painfully, however definitely I did familiarize myself with Linux (RHEL) & the database, exposing myself to building systems with copies of EBS running for development & testing.

Our instance is approximately 650GB as on date, including both application stack and database & a cold backup is hardly 125GB in tar balls. I have attempted & succeeded to build the cloned instances on my home desktop machine many times, however the performance was a huge issue, forcing me to discard the setups quite often.

This time, I decided NOT to discard as my new desktop at home is a beast compared to my previous machine, that was neither less a best ;) & to figure out “something” that will address the “performance” bottleneck.

I created a new VM using Oracle VirtualBox with following specs

6 processors, 20GB memory & 2 fixed size VDI files (120GB, 600GB) respectively for application and database repositories. I was aware of a limitation already, I was setting up the VDI files on a Western Digital Green series 2TB drive! which spins at 5400RPM!

Well, everything went smooth & and I had the instance up and running in couple of hours time & this time, the response of the instance was awesome. I even boasted about finally winning over the “biatch” to my team & sat back feeling “too proud” for the moment.

Next day (Month End 30th April 2019)

I am all excited after figuring out a way to flush GNOME desktop environment & replace it with Xfce & new tricks…

Started the VM at home, started the EBS instance and tried to access the instance from the same machine. I couldn’t even get the login page…something was gravely wrong. I decided to check the performance monitor and found the following:

Slowly I was forced to recognize the terror! The Standard Concurrent manager was configured to process 25 requests at the same time with a cache of 5 & 30 seconds sleep between the requests. Our month end has a number of scheduled jobs + Gather schema statistics in the queue. My VM was breaking up with the I/O. My 2TB storage oriented disk was NOT spinning fast enough to provide the data for the processes & I was left with the BIGGEST question of the hour “Now what?”

I stopped the Concurrent manager, adjusted the processes to 5 for Standard manager & restarted the instance. Left the instance running whole night and 1st May morning, the instance was back to normal performance as whole the scheduled jobs were finished during the night.

Next day I added one 1TB SSD & moved the application & database VDI files over to it. I was able to get the login screen within 2-3 seconds once after the application started from the VM. I submitted number of create accounting and other resource hungry jobs, which were completed in few seconds time…

Now, my setup is ONLY for the sake of it. It doesn’t have many users, it is idle most of the time & almost every day I shutdown the desktop machine after a day’s usage. This might not be the scenario at a real TEST environment. You may need to implement archive logging & RMAN, those all requiring more space & faster access to storage. A Desktop has less resources & the ONLY positive element you are going to live with is the pleasure of building it & knowledge gained while fixing few new issues.

So, can you build a performance oriented R12 using Desktop environment, the short answer is yes. Does it worth the efforts? Well, definitely YOU are the ONE who have to answer it.

Follow the space & soon I will post a thread explaining the entire exercises. If you are in a hurry, you may refer this

The above article loosely explains how to clone R12 instance on Linux 7. However the same could be followed for Linux 6 as well (both RHEL & OEL)

regards,

rajesh