Re: To ODA or Not?

You are in luck. The latest release of the ODA uses ACFS for the database storage which has snapshot/clone technology similar to NetApp. ACFS and all of its snapshotting capabilities are included.

ACFS also has replication capabilities which would seem to alleviate your concern about not having snap mirrors.

Your idea of using VMs for segregation is perfectly feasible but hopefully not necessary. The ODA creates a domain called ODABASE which is meant to be the database tier of the appliance while the rest of the resources can be used for VMs. If you have multiple database versions you need to support, simply install those additional oracle homes in ODABASE and run your databases from there. Since you are not running RAC, you don't need to worry about Oracle Clusterware compatibility.

As far as patch testing, there's no magic answer for that. If there is a need to alleviate this risk, you will need to do it with DR and have another environment available in case something goes wrong with patching. I don't see how this would be any different than patching commodity hardware though since you have the same risk (more actually since patching the ODA is much safer than patching commodity) of a failed patch.

Seth Miller

On Fri, Mar 27, 2015 at 3:39 PM, Jeff Chirco <backseatdba_at_gmail.com> wrote:

> I had another thread started about the ODA but I wanted to separate it out.
> I am currently up for a hardware refresh and tossing around the idea of
> Oracle Database Appliance. But in my environment I am not sure if it just
> that easy.
>
> To start, everything currently runs on Windows 2008 R2 64bit. So that is
> our first big change, going to Linux.
> *We have 4 servers:*
>
> - Production 1: Runs 5 EE 11.2.0.4 database's but really 4 of those
> are mostly idle with one acting as our main system. This a 4 CPU box so
> with a .5 multiplier we are licensed for 2 CPU. And currently we are not
> even utilizing half of the CPU and about half of the memory which is 96gb.
> - Test 1: Same server and license as above it just runs all test and
> dev databases
> - Production 2: Runs 3 SE1 11.2.0.4 database for third party
> applications but the communication to Prod 1 for some data. CPU is also
> lightly used on here.
> - Test 2: 1 SE 11.2.0.4 database on here but this server is not that
> important.
>
>
> - 5th server acts as our Data Guard server for just 1 of the database
> running on Prod 1. This is a single CPU server. Meant as a last resort.
>
> *Current Storage*: NetApp SAN, 27tb. The NetApp SAN is nice with ability
> to quickly take a database snapshot/backup (1-2minutes) and then make a
> database clone from that in less than 5 minutes for our 400gb database.
> Plus it has the ability to Snap Mirror all the snapshots to our off site
> location.
>
> If we were to get an ODA since we don't run or have a current need for
> RAC,
>
> 1. One solution would be to have one of the servers for Production and
> other for Test/Dev. I would combine all of our databases into this one
> machine. Then they would all be EE and probably go to 12c and plug able if
> I can get the budget approval for it. But there is another added expense.
> 2. The solution I am thinking makes most sense is turning VM on kind
> of mimicking our current environment so I can keep our third party systems
> separate and on a separate database version if need be. But still all on
> Linux. Then I can create another VM for Enterprise Manager which I
> currently have running on Windows.
>
> But what do I do about our existing snapshot technology with NetApp and
> the mirroring. I believe there is not data mirroring technology with the
> ODA storage. Then are we relying on Data Guard everything or moving backups
> some other way? I heard the ODA has the snap clone technology so we could
> still create dev clones quickly right? Is this an extra cost?
>
> Speaking of Data Guard, since we probably wont be buying two ODA's, we
> will have to stand up our own stand alone Oracle Linux server and support
> that and buy support for it.
>
> Speaking of buying only 1. I dont't think I can get approval for that
> unless they give it to us dirt cheap. This means we have no way to test out
> ODA patches and updates. This sounds scary to me.
>
> Ok so that was a long email. Thank you in advanced for anybody that got
> through it and chimes in and I'm aware that this probably requires a deeper
> discussion.
>
> Jeff
>
>
>
>

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