Re: Help sizing Oracle 9iAS on Sun servers

Sun actually maintains a lab and a sizing group specifically to answer this kind of question. You might have better luck using their facility. Push their sales people to provide the answer - and get them to confirm and re-qualify their answer in writing. (Oracle needs more references - get them involved to ensure Sun doesn't bloat the requirements.)

The statement you have from 'some guys' is absolutely and utterly useless. And, in fact, wrong for many situations!

9iAS is a beast of many, many different capabilities and colors. You need to describe which version, which edition, and even then which functionalities before accepting any sizing hints. [rhetorical] Are you doing any reporting? Forms? Do you need SSO, LDAP, etc?

In every case, I would consider spreading over a number of machines - by function. For example, if you enable web cache, put that on one or more separate (logical) machines. Once you have a logical architecture with the functions spread over many machines, then look at consolidating based on expected loading.

If you are using Standard or Enterprise, you definitely need to consider a separate infrastructure machine - doesn't need to be huge - to store the infrastructure database, LDAP and metadata services. Note that this database should not (can not) be used as a regular database for your end user data and should be on it's own server (and subnet) accessible to all the other 9iAS machines.

I would also consider using more smaller machines, having roughly the same CPU count in the end (so same price) and using 9iAS' load balancing, islanding and failover capabilities if appropriate

What tools are you using to drill through to the database? It almost sounds like you will use Discoverer and Reports - consider distributed machines for load balance and cache. Is there any integration - are you using the Intgration Services portion of 9iAS? Will you be using Workflow portion? Do you need message queueing portion or mail/pager notifications?

How many pages? How much is dynamically generated? Can you cache sub-pages? Are you using Portal? What is your security policy?

Each thing you need will have it's own architecture and size consideration.

Since you are a newbie - please, Please, PLEASE do not try to make the decisions based on documents and newsgroup recommendations alone. Use the documentation available at http://otn.oracle.com as a guide but get the Oracle and Sun sales reps to help you or get experienced 3rd party consultants.

/Hans Received on Thu May 29 2003 - 11:52:08 CDT