9.0 club

A bit of a milestone here - Praxair went live on 9.0 on Monday. So far so good. Our environment:

Database server - Oracle 11g r2, Oracle Enterprise Linux, Oracle Exadata II server.

Web layer - six linux Weblogic servers on an Oracle Virtual Machine farm.

App server layer - four Windows servers. Two huge physical servers and two virtual servers hosted on OVM.

Integration servers - three linux weblogic Business Services servers running on OVM

Middleware layer - four windows Weblogic Fusion servers providing interfaces to numerous external applications.

One windows terminal server for power users.

Two windows servers for use with our Tidal enterprise scheduler.

Almost in production - a K-Rise web application server hosting a custom developer Supplier Self Service application.

The weblogic servers are load balanced with an F5 big IP application load balancer.

We originally built and tested six linux app servers, but those did not make the cut. We replaced them with Windows boxes. We had too many issues communicating with windows print servers and with UBEs with windows APIs to find the linux batch servers a practical solution.

In phase one, we moved over around 900 users from XE to 9.0. In upcoming phases, we will add in 9 or 10 thousand more users.

- Gregg

Gregg,

Congratulations and welcome to the club. Sounds like it went well. Hopefully you will find, as we did, that 9.0 is a pretty stable release. A pleasant change from the old B7332 days.

Fascinating to see the technical detail and the scope of your project - you will be massive compared to us. And I thought we were a bit on the larger side.

Mark Dixon

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In phase one, we moved over around 900 users from XE to 9.0. In upcoming phases, we will add in 9 or 10 thousand more users.

- Gregg

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So the current configuration is to host 900 named users - that seems fine. Seems you're going to be ramping up on the web servers in a big way over time - and almost certainly the app servers too.

Interesting what you stated about your printing issues. Why are you not using an external printing solution to resolve those issues ? Of course, the benefit of linux is that you don't have to replace hardware if you don't like them - you just reformat them as windows machines !

Thanks Mark

Globally we probably have about 8000 users spread across four continents. Over time, the strategy is to fold all of those users into the US data center into four instances of 9.0. The exadata will be common to all of the instances. The setup for phase one will be the model for the other instances.

The exadata can scale out to multiple racks acting as a unit. It can be modularily upgraded over time as faster processors come out. It is a mainframe for running Oracle databases.

We will also be adding additional users as we fade out a legacy ERP that we use for our package gas businesses. Phase one is live. Eight more phases to go.

- Gregg

Hi Jon

Yea, we will be scaling out big time. We are overscaled for the amount of users we have on 9.0, but we are developing a pattern for later and we have enough servers for the current production users and for phase 2 which is starting right away.

Linux servers - we set up six linux batch servers and had one legacy windows batch server. We found two issues. One was lack of a decent print direct functionality. We opted not to add to the complexity by adding in a third party printing solution just to support linux for print direct.

The second issue was windows APIs. We found that some custom developed UBEs, as well as some Oracle UBEs that we want to use have embeded windows apis that the linux boxes just couldn't handle. Since the early phase of the project development was done with a Windows batch server, this shortcoming wasn't discovered until late in the project. By that point we had already decided that windows would be part of the batch picture. From there it wasn't a huge leap to just stick to our area of expertise and switch over to all windows batch servers. In the end, fighting the battle to make linux batch servers work for our environment just wasn't worth the fight.

On the web side of the equation, Linux is working fine for the weblogic servers. So we kept that part on linux. The interesting thing is that there is a version of weblogic that will work directly with OVM, cutting linux out the equation. But trying to actually find out more information on that version of weblogic, and whether it was certified for JDE, turned into a dry hole of research. So we went with the OVM templates that Oracle provided.

OVM is quite stable now, but if you'll recall my posts from over the summer, it took quite some effort to wrestle OVM into submission.

Question - I am guessing that we are the first JDE shop to put an Exadata II into production, is anyone else on one or ramping one up?

How about OVM - has anyone else gone live on a production OVM environment yet?

- Gregg

Welcome to the 9.0 club Gregg. We just finished our 9.0 upgrade and been live for three weeks. It was an effort but made smoother with our great project team and testing team.

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Question - I am guessing that we are the first JDE shop to put an Exadata II into production, is anyone else on one or ramping one up?

- Gregg

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We just recently upgraded to 9.0 from 8.10 (went live last November), and just requested a demo/discussion with our Oracle rep about possibly using an Exadata. Probably won't be for a bit yet, but we're seperating out our infrastructure from our former sister company, so will need to get our own hardware.

Gregg,

Congratulations on your 9.0 upgrade! A few weeks ago I performed a search here on JDELIST for automation of AP 3-way match. Praxair created a complete customized solution. I was wondering if Praxair continued with that customized solution with a retrofit or chose to go a different route? We are considering several options and was curious what Praxair chose to do.

Greg,

In your deployment are you using Oracle Web Cache?

Thank you - Chules

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Greg,

In your deployment are you using Oracle Web Cache?

Thank you - Chules

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No we are not - we have an F5 handling the web caching.