Migrating From AIX to Windows 2003

I have a DSS system which has been heavily tuned over the past few years. The system is tuned as well as it likely will be tuned. But it's heavily loaded with jobs.

We are tasked with Migrating from AIX to Windows 2003.

I am reviewing the overall architectures, and while both systems will be running 32-bit versions of Oracle, and both have a 32-bit OS kernel, the underlying IBM hardware on the UNIX platform is 64-bit.

The licensing arrangments at the time were for 32-bit Oracle, hence the 32-bit kernel.

I'm reviewing the overall platform specs, and am aware of the memory addressing limitations surrounding 32-bit Windows - the /3GB switch, / PAE, etc.

I am trying to assess from a very high level whether this architecture conversion will impose a significant performance risk. As to disk storage, both systems will access a SAN. I have little details on differences between the SAN configurations, if any.

SOURCE SYSTEM:
AIX 5.2 - platform: IBM,7028-6C4
CPUs: 4x64bit @1002MHz
RAM: 7168MB
Kernel: 32Bit
Oracle: 9i 32Bit

TARGET SYSTEM
Windows 2003 Enterprise 32bit
CPUs: 4xdual-core 32-bit_at_2.6GHz
RAM: 16GB
Kernel: 32Bit
Oracle: 10g 32Bit

To me, the biggest concern is the hoops needed to be jumped through to access memory under Windows. I'm about to investigate pushing the buffer cache into the PAE range, to free up additional core memory for the PGA and Shared Pool. I'm hoping that will assist with some performance issues we're seeing.

Any overall comments would be welcome.

Oh - and the decision to leave AIX has already been made. No going back. ;-) Received on Fri Feb 23 2007 - 11:03:39 CST