Sanae BEKKAR – My Blog –

Exalogic is a computer appliance made by Oracle, or better called an engineered system where software and hardware have been put into one big box.

First of all, let’s have a look at the hardware: Oracle Exalogic is a rack of up to 30 compute nodes mounted in a rack with Infiniband backplane and ZFS storage (ZFS is a combined file system and logical volume manager designed by Sun), where each compute node has two Intel Xeon x86 CPUs with six cores each.

This means that a full rack has a total of 360 cores. All of these individual servers are interconnected with each other via Infiniband networking with the ability to connect together up to eight racks of Exalogic or Exadata on one Infiniband network.

Each of these 30 servers has 96 GB of RAM and 64 GB of Solid State Disks.

Additionally, the rack has 60 TB of SAS disk storage to be shared between those 30 servers All this sounds fairly impressive on paper, however unlike traditional hardware, customers don’t have the flexibility to select the components they need in this hardware configuration, except to buy a quarter of the rack, a half rack, or a full rack.

Inside an Exalogic Machine you will find:

• Integrated Storage: Each Exalogic hardware configuration includes an Infiniband-attached ZFS storage cluster usable for application binaries, log files, or any other application requiring high performance, highly available disk storage. The storage is shared for applications, and clustered. It consists of 40 TB disks with 4 TB read cache and 72 GB write cache.

• Infiniband I/O Fabric and 10 GbE: Infiniband is a high speed connection bus for internal and external connections in Oracle’s engineered systems such as Exadata and Exalogic.

All software components within Oracle Exalogic are optimized to use this high-speed Inifinband bus, which can perform up to a speed of 40 GB/s in theory, of course. Connections between an Exalogic and Exadata can go over this Infiniband bus, but its limit is when it goes outside the box, because there is no Infiniband interface available. However, this can be emulated using Ethernet over Infiniband (EoIB) which can perform up to 10 GB/s.

As you can see at the specifications, Inifiniband performs much faster than the traditional hardware used in conventional systems.

The WebLogic Exalogic optimization was introduced from version 10.3.4, which you could enable in the WebLogic Admin Console.

This Exalogic Optimization is represented by Exalogic Optimizations Enabled MBean, The optimization is needed because it will have to process the immense performance boost an Exalogic system delivers.

Also, WebLogic thread management and request processing are brought up to speed to serve the Java applications, which are running in this high-speed environment.

To enable this in the console, go to the Domain Structure pane and click on the domain name.

• Compute Nodes: The Compute nodes in the Exalogic system can be up to (30x) Intel Xeon x86 compute nodes with redundant Infiniband connectivity, power and solid state disks. Its CPUs can be up to 360 Xeon cores (2.93 GHz), 12 cores per server, 8/16/30 server configurations (per rack).

Memory in a full rack is 2.8 TB DRAM, 960 GB SSD.