JDE supported in Microsoft Azure

FromJohannesburg

Member
Hi All,

I have a customer, a large construction company with $2.2 Billion in yearly revenue. Safe to say they have a massive infrastructure of which JDE forms a large portion. We are in the process of designing a cloud solution for them to meet their disaster recovery requirements. They are at the end of their hardware life cycle and would ideally prefer to run everything in the cloud, their current cloud provider is Microsoft's Azure platform. They are heavily invested already so it is not an option to consider AWS or any other major player. So please bear that in mind when you answer.

Their version is as follows:

Application server : Oracle JD Edwards 8.11 SP1
Tools Release code : EnterpriseOne Tools 8.98.4
Web servers : Oracle WebLogic Server 11G

My question is, I'd like to know if this can be run in Microsoft Azure. They have lots of customization in their JDE environment so I imagine this makes it a challenge but I am struggling to find any useful info (via Google search) on whether or not this version can be run in Microsoft Azure. If it can be run in Azure, it would be helpful to understand what limitations there are (if any), and if can't be then it would be helpful to understand why it can't be run in Azure.

Thanks guys.

Ciao for now,
FromJohannesburg
 
How big is their system and what sort of transaction volumes are they processing, especially through their GL if they are in construction?

As for support, Oracle aren't going to officially support 8.98.4 in the cloud. If you can present Windows 2008 instances then there's no reason it couldn't work. What sort of on premise hardware are they retiring and was it running Windows? You need to be very careful with your Azure set up (or any public cloud offering for that matter) because JDE does not handle latency well.
 
The answer is yes.

There should be no technical reason why you can't run your infrastructure on Azure. As long as Azure supports the JDE Minimum Technical Requirements - not sure even how Oracle could have an issue.

That statement should go with ANY cloud company, software provider or ASP. As long as the platform supports the JDE Minimum Technical Requirements, why should there be ANY issue with using that platform ?!!!
 
The answer is yes.

There should be no technical reason why you can't run your infrastructure on Azure. As long as Azure supports the JDE Minimum Technical Requirements - not sure even how Oracle could have an issue.

That statement should go with ANY cloud company, software provider or ASP. As long as the platform supports the JDE Minimum Technical Requirements, why should there be ANY issue with using that platform ?!!!

Minimum technical requirements really only relate to software versions and Oracle does not support Microsoft Azure in the same way they don't support VMWare ESXi.

With using a public cloud like Microsoft Azure there are lots of ways for there to be ANY issue with using that platform. For example, 8.11SP1 uses the old specs architecture which means to get good package build performance you need high speed disk with low latency to the deployment server and a deployment server with one high speed CPU core. Difficult things to get in cloud. You also need low latency and high throughput between your enterprise server and your database server. So you need to stay away from the Azure database offering and stick with a IAAS for everything. You will likely need to invest in the Azure Performance Storage (this was specifically introduced because they were having issues getting SAP to work in Azure) to ensure you get adequate performance.

Our experience with construction companies is they tend to load the system up heavily during month end so any performance bottlenecks are exaggerated during what is a high stress period for the business. Not good, especially if they are used to having high end hardware from their on premise systems. Cloud can be a useful solution but you need to know what you're doing when it comes to deploying JDE out in the ether...
 
Thanks for the responses guys. This company has a 600 Mbps internet breakout and a 200 Mbps internet breakout. So their connectivity is fast, very fast. I venture a guess that this kind of speed would not see JDE suffer any latency issues. Then, regarding the type of Azure virtual machine we can provide, we can surely just opt for a big template with enough CPU power to support what JDE requires? Regarding the storage, I hear you and have made a note of that.

Regarding their transaction volumes, I'm not entirely sure but their storage transactions currently total about 60 000 so I think that's the max that the system currently sees across their entire infrastructure. IAAS is not strictly required here as this is a DR solution (IE won't be running at all if ever, only in DR situations). Their production workloads won't be running constantly in Azure, it will have maximum 30% VM up time for maintenance of those DR VM's. Azure Site Recovery will be responsible for getting those VM's into Azure and from there incremental updates will be made. The same goes for backup, although that will be handled by Veeam as far as I know. We will automate the change over of IP addressing and DNS to Azure so that communication through the environment can continue, if a DR situation is invoked. The DR automation will also have an ordered start, via Azure automation, to make sure everything starts up in the correct order in a DR situation.

So, my question was simply to work out if I can actually get this JDE environment to run on a copy of the on premise virtual machine, but in Azure in a DR situation so that the company can scramble to get on premise back online while operations continues. If you're saying it can but only that I need to be aware of CPU power and storage speed then I can make recommendations to the customer about what is required and highlight any possible snags to the solution which we can test for during our pilot of the solution which is planned soon.

Thanks Guys, this was helpful.
 
I've stated this for almost the past decade. Oracle doesn't CERTIFY certain products like VMWare (and, these days, most other cloud offerings). They will still support JDE running on those products BUT if they cannot replicate an issue with hardware, then they will point the customer to the non-certified vendor.

Thats a big BIG difference to "not supporting" a certain solution. JDE doesn't "support" lots of things - but customers use those things all the time. Its a BIG red-flag when consultants state "its not supported" versus "its not certified".

Now - as far as performance is concerned, then yes, you have to be careful. Just sticking JDE these days onto a Pentium Pro machine from the 90's ain't going to give you the performance you need. But IAAS providers like AWS and Azure wouldn't be doing much business if their solutions weren't able to provide similar performance to bare-metal hardware. Same with Virtualization platforms.

I literally ran a presentation at Collaborate in 2007 that specifically talked about the myths people have between different virtualization platforms - and showed a benchmark between VMWare, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix and OVM on the same piece of hardware vs installing on windows on that piece of hardware. Before that presentation, people were warning that Virtualizaton solutions "weren't production ready" and that performance would be multiple-factors slower than bare metal. My presentation and benchmark specifically showed that performance was maybe 20% difference between bare-metal and virtualization running JDE - and that was with an almost decade-old version of VMWare.

These days, companies like VMWare have narrowed the gap significantly - nobody today questions the performance of virtualization vs bare-metal for applications. The same goes with IAAS providers.

If JDE didn't work on these IaaS providers, then companies would be looking at alternative software (like SAP). Believe me, its HORRIBLE for our industry if technology became a barrier - after all, thats one of the most core conceptions of JDE - that we're PLATFORM INDEPENDENT to a major degree.

Now to support Russell - I totally recommend AGAINST using Amazon RDS or Azures' "database as a service" solution right now. There are significant changes between, say running an Oracle database on a virtual host - and having a database served to you. Its not possible, for example, to run Datapump to Amazon RDS - so its not possible to even do an install. But I'm sure later on, DBaaS providers WILL change to be able to support products like JDE. I know that Oracles working to get its DBaaS platform "jde ready" - but its not there yet.

So, if you want to use Azure - go ahead. Just make sure you use the IaaS services of Azure.
 
I've stated this for almost the past decade. Oracle doesn't CERTIFY certain products like VMWare (and, these days, most other cloud offerings). They will still support JDE running on those products BUT if they cannot replicate an issue with hardware, then they will point the customer to the non-certified vendor.

Thats a big BIG difference to "not supporting" a certain solution. JDE doesn't "support" lots of things - but customers use those things all the time. Its a BIG red-flag when consultants state "its not supported" versus "its not certified".

Now - as far as performance is concerned, then yes, you have to be careful. Just sticking JDE these days onto a Pentium Pro machine from the 90's ain't going to give you the performance you need. But IAAS providers like AWS and Azure wouldn't be doing much business if their solutions weren't able to provide similar performance to bare-metal hardware. Same with Virtualization platforms.

I literally ran a presentation at Collaborate in 2007 that specifically talked about the myths people have between different virtualization platforms - and showed a benchmark between VMWare, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix and OVM on the same piece of hardware vs installing on windows on that piece of hardware. Before that presentation, people were warning that Virtualizaton solutions "weren't production ready" and that performance would be multiple-factors slower than bare metal. My presentation and benchmark specifically showed that performance was maybe 20% difference between bare-metal and virtualization running JDE - and that was with an almost decade-old version of VMWare.

These days, companies like VMWare have narrowed the gap significantly - nobody today questions the performance of virtualization vs bare-metal for applications. The same goes with IAAS providers.

If JDE didn't work on these IaaS providers, then companies would be looking at alternative software (like SAP). Believe me, its HORRIBLE for our industry if technology became a barrier - after all, thats one of the most core conceptions of JDE - that we're PLATFORM INDEPENDENT to a major degree.

Now to support Russell - I totally recommend AGAINST using Amazon RDS or Azures' "database as a service" solution right now. There are significant changes between, say running an Oracle database on a virtual host - and having a database served to you. Its not possible, for example, to run Datapump to Amazon RDS - so its not possible to even do an install. But I'm sure later on, DBaaS providers WILL change to be able to support products like JDE. I know that Oracles working to get its DBaaS platform "jde ready" - but its not there yet.

So, if you want to use Azure - go ahead. Just make sure you use the IaaS services of Azure.

Thanks for the comments Altquark. In further conversation with the customer it was revealed that the reason they are concerned about Azure is because of the current issue with their VMware SRM replication tool. So when SRM replicates the JDE VM, it locks the disk and then JDE collapses. So it turns out it's not really related to running it in Azure but more about being able to replicate into Azure without the disk being locked thus keeping JDE stable. The current method for doing this is doing regular netbackup without causing the disk to lock but the downside is that it causes massive overhead while the snap shot runs which of course hands JDE its favorite thing, latency!

Thank you for the comments, I've learnt a valuable amount of information. Your input is greatly appreciated.
 
Interesting about the Azure SRM replication - I think that the "disk locking" would affect pretty much any type of service - unless that service was "aware" of the disk lock. Perhaps if the database server was "standalone" without JDE Services - then it could be replicated that way - and that a standalone application server could be built in Azure that was ready to work against the database server ?

I think you're starting to see why I've always recommended separating the Database layer from the Application layer - allowing certain tools or services to work that wouldn't work for an "all-in-one" enterprise server.

If your customer is successful with this - I think it'd be an awesome whitepaper/case-study for many other customers to enjoy.
 
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